Closed eye detection opencv C++

Question

I need to detect closed eyes only and also both eyes separately. That means I need to tell if left eye is open or closed, also same about the right eye.

I tried few ways. One of them is to detect eyes with haarcascade_eye and haarcascade_eye_tree_eyeglasses separately and then compare the results. If both detect eye, then eye open, if one detect and another can't,then eye closed. This trick was taken from this link:

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/OpenCV/messages/87666?threaded=1&m=e&var=1&tidx=1

But it doesn't work as expected.eye cascade detectors don't work as mentioned in the link. Much close results are found with those haarcascade that I mentioned above. Sometimes it gives correct result, sometimes it can't. I don't know why. Besides it can't be told with this method that which eye is open and which eye is closed.

Now can someone help me to solve this?? At least I need a way to tell that one of the eyes is closed regardless which one and need to do that accurately. Please help.......

Answer 1

If you want to avoid training your own Haar cascade to detect a single eye, you can attempt simpler techniques such as pupil detection. If you fail to detect a black circle, the eye is closed. If you have a smallish region of interest, this probably works very well. Another option would be color histograms of the eye region, which may look pretty different for the open and closed state.

If you cannot predict with reasonable accuracy where the eyes can be found in the image, these approaches are doomed and your best shot is training your own cascade I think.