A Novel Method for Horizontal Eye Line Detection under Various Environments

The eye line is de ̄ned to be a horizontal line passing the two eyes of a human face. It can be used to help locate the true positions of eyes and face. In this paper, we propose a method to extract the horizontal eye line of a face under various environments. Based on the facts that the eye color is very di®erent from skin color and the gray level variance of an eye is high, some eye-like regions are ̄rst located. Then the horizontal eye line is extracted based on the located eye-like regions and some geometric properties in a face. Experimental results are given to show that the proposed method is robust under a wide range of lighting conditions, di®erent poses and races. The detection rate for HHI face database is 95.63%. For Champion face database, the detection rate is 94.27%.