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With the advance of semiconductor technology, the current mobile devices support multimodal input and multimedia output. In turn, human computer communication applications can be developed in mobile devices such as mobile phone and PDA. This paper addresses the research issues of face and eye detection on mobile devices. The major obstacles that we need to overcome are the relatively low processor speed, low storage memory and low image (CMOS senor) quality. To solve these problems, this paper proposes a novel and efficient method for face and eye detection. The proposed method is based on color information because the computation time is small. However, the color information is sensitive to the illumination changes. In view of this limitation, this paper proposes an adaptive Illumination Insensitive (AI²) Algorithm, which dynamically calculates the skin color region based on an image color distribution. Moreover, to solve the strong sunlight effect, which turns the skin color pixel into saturation, a dual-color-space model is also developed. Based on AI²algorithm and face boundary information, face region is located. The eye detection method is based on an average integral of density, projection techniques and Gabor filters. To quantitatively evaluate the performance of the face and eye detection, a new metric is proposed. 2158 head & shoulder images captured under uncontrolled indoor and outdoor lighting conditions are used for evaluation. The accuracy in face detection and eye detection are 98% and 97% respectively. Moreover, the average computation time of one image using Matlab code in Pentium III 700MHz computer is less than 15 seconds. The computational time will be reduced to tens hundreds of millisecond (ms) if low level programming language is used for implementation. The results are encouraging and show that the proposed method is suitable for mobile devices.

The literature on the topic has shown a strong correlation between the degree of precision of face localization and the face recognition performance. Hence, there is a need for precise facial feature detectors, as well as objective measures for their evaluation and comparison.

In this paper, we will present significant improvements to a previous method for precise eye center localization, by integrating a module for mouth localization. The technique is based on Support Vector Machines trained on optimally chosen Haar wavelet coefficients. The method has been tested on several public databases; the results are reported and compared according to a standard error measure. The tests show that the algorithm achieves high precision of localization.

The eyes are important facial landmarks, both for image normalization due to their relatively constant interocular distance, and for post processing due to the anchoring on model-based schemes. This paper introduces a novel approach for the eye detection task using optimal wavelet packets for eye representation and Radial Basis Functions (RBFs) for subsequent classification ("labeling") of facial areas as eye versus non-eye regions. Entropy minimization is the driving force behind the derivation of optimal wavelet packets. It decreases the degree of data dispersion and it thus facilitates clustering ("prototyping") and capturing the most significant characteristics of the underlying (eye regions) data. Entropy minimization is thus functionally compatible with the first operational stage of the RBF classifier, that of clustering, and this explains the improved RBF performance on eye detection. Our experiments on the eye detection task prove the merit of this approach as they show that eye images compressed using optimal wavelet packets lead to improved and robust performance of the RBF classifier compared to the case where original raw images are used by the RBF classifier.

This paper presents a novel hands-free human machine interface (HMI) for elderly and disabled people by fusing multi-modality bioinformation abstracted from forehead electromyography (EMG) signals and facial images of a user. The interface allows users to drive an electric-powered wheelchair using face movements such as jaw clenching and eye blinking. An indoor environment is set up for evaluating the application of this interface. Five intact subjects participated in the experiment to drive the intelligent wheelchair following designated routes and avoiding obstacles. Comparisons are made between this new interface and the traditional joystick control in terms of the easiness of control, travel time, wheelchair trajectory, and error command. The experimental results show that the proposed new control method is comparable to the joystick control method and can be used as a hands-free controller for the intelligent wheelchair.