An Embedded System for an Eye Detection Sensor

Real-time eye detection is important for many HCI applications, including eye-gaze tracking, auto-stereoscopic displays, video conferencing, face detection and recognition. Current commercial and research systems use a software implementation and require a dedicated computer for the image-processing task, a large, expensive and complicated-to-use solution. In this paper, we present a hardware-based embedded system for eye detection implemented using an FPGA, with no CPU. A prototype system uses a 1.3MPixel digital imaging sensor at 27Mpixel/sec rate and outputs a compact list of sub-pixel accurate (x,y) eye coordinates via USB communication. By eliminating the CPU in the implementation architecture, the processing rate is only limited by the effective sensor pixel rate. Our design is suitable for single-chip eye detection and eye-gaze tracking sensors.

By: Lior Zimet, Sean Kao, Arnon Amir, Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli

Published in: RJ10289 in 2003

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