Automatic red-eye detection and correction

"Red-eye" is a phenomenon that causes the eyes of flash photography subjects to appear unnaturally reddish in color. Though commercial solutions exist for red-eye correction, all of them require some measure of user intervention. A method is presented to automatically detect and correct redeye in digital images. First, faces are detected with a cascade of multi-scale classifiers. The red-eye pixels are then located with several refining masks computed over the facial region. The masks are created by thresholding per-pixel metrics, designed to detect red-eye artifacts. Once the redeye pixels have been found, the redness is attenuated with a tapered color desaturation. A detector implemented with this system corrected 95% of the red-eye artifacts in 200 tested images.