Implementation of Human Factor "Eye-Contact" in Non-Verbal Communication

In this study, we discuss the quality of teleconference with respect to especially the "eye-contact". Recently, teleconference system can be used easily even in the mobile phone environment with camera, and many people use it in daily life. Since human is likely to look at the face of his partner on monitor not at camera, he will usually fail to send his own eye-contacted facial images to him, and vice versa. We pay attention to the disagreement of the eye-contact in teleconference caused by the separation between the input camera and output monitor devices. Then we propose the eye-contact camera system for generating eye-contacted motion images to the receiver. In this system, iris contour is extracted after the face region extraction, the vertical and horizontal directions of the glance are calculated based on the relation among positions of the monitor, camera and receiver, and finally the iris center coordinates are shifted in the image so that the partner looks just looking at him, and vice versa. We implemented the system on note PC with Web-camera for evaluating the usability.