Face tracking software on mac (in build camera)

Question

I want a way to track a user looking at a screen over time.

E.g. in normal use what exact seconds of the day had the user looking at the screen.

I'm wondering what innovative ideas or pre-existing software would allow me to do this.

So for more detail the way I see it is there would be some tolerance levels e.g. distance from screen, angle of head to screen that would be considered "engaged" with the monitor. If the camera on say a mac book pro was used to track this then it would record in a text file/key value store a timestamp and boolean value for each second of the time the program in turned on.

Anyone any experience with this sort of thing?

Answer 1

You can find a good starting point here: http://code.google.com/p/ehci/

It's a software based on OpenCV that tracks head and detect its orientation. It's opensource.

Answer 2

There are facetrackers implemented (and already trained with markers), for example in OpenCV. I suggest you to first start with just tracking faces. Once you have a robust facetracker, and you can generate output telling how long a face has been looking at the screen, etc.

Later you can add improvements. Once you detect a face, you can try to recognize people analizing face pixels.

Another line is to recognize parts of the face, like mouth, eyes, nose, eyebrows...

If you can track face and parts of the face, you can try to recognize facial expression patterns, like happines, sadness, etc..