Viewer authentication for personalized iTV services

The proliferation of interactive digital TV services will depend on their complexity and ease of use. The investigation of simple, intuitive human-machine interfaces is therefore crucial for their success. Personalized iTV services require consumer authentication and consumer input, which is traditionally done by using the remote control. In this paper, we investigate alternative ways to collect consumer input based on computer vision methods. The goal of the proposed system is to enable consumer authentication and automatic collection of consumer feedback on the TV program. The image processing system on the STB continually monitors the TVviewer(s). The face detection is employed to detect and track the number of people watching the TV program. Face recognition is employed to identify specific TV viewers, which is necessary in order to enable personalized user interface and personalized services. Eye detection and gaze recognition is used to continually track the interest level of the specific viewer towards the TV content, which is important feedback information.