Automatic eye detection in facial images with unconstrained backgrounds

Humans convey information on their emotional stale by their facial expression. A system capable of determining the emotions of a person based on expression would have many useful applications including security, assessment of satisfaction of commercial products, and interactive systems which were able to respond in a more satisfactory manner taking into account the emotional state of the user. In this paper we describe a system which explores the use of two statistical metrics which use different characteristics of full face images to allow the position of the eyes to be calculated, in under one second, as the first stage in an automated system for measuring facial expressions. The test video images use head and shoulder images filmed on a plain background superimposed on a range of virtual backgrounds.