1. Real-time face & eye tracking and blink detection using event cameras
- Author
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Etienne Perot, Aisling Cahill, Joseph Lemley, Cian Ryan, Christoph Posch, Amr Elrasad, Paul Kielty, and Brian O'Sullivan
- Subjects
Male ,0209 industrial biotechnology ,Computer science ,Cognitive Neuroscience ,ComputingMethodologies_IMAGEPROCESSINGANDCOMPUTERVISION ,02 engineering and technology ,Convolutional neural network ,020901 industrial engineering & automation ,Artificial Intelligence ,Minimum bounding box ,Photography ,0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering ,Humans ,Computer vision ,Eye-Tracking Technology ,Blinking ,Pixel ,business.industry ,Event (computing) ,Frame (networking) ,Recurrent neural network ,Neuromorphic engineering ,Eye tracking ,020201 artificial intelligence & image processing ,Neural Networks, Computer ,Artificial intelligence ,business - Abstract
Event cameras contain emerging, neuromorphic vision sensors that capture local-light intensity changes at each pixel, generating a stream of asynchronous events. This way of acquiring visual information constitutes a departure from traditional frame-based cameras and offers several significant advantages — low energy consumption, high temporal resolution, high dynamic range and low latency. Driver monitoring systems (DMS) are in-cabin safety systems designed to sense and understand a drivers physical and cognitive state. Event cameras are particularly suited to DMS due to their inherent advantages. This paper proposes a novel method to simultaneously detect and track faces and eyes for driver monitoring. A unique, fully convolutional recurrent neural network architecture is presented. To train this network, a synthetic event-based dataset is simulated with accurate bounding box annotations, called Neuromorphic-HELEN. Additionally, a method to detect and analyse drivers’ eye blinks is proposed, exploiting the high temporal resolution of event cameras. Behaviour of blinking provides greater insights into a driver level of fatigue or drowsiness. We show that blinks have a unique temporal signature that can be better captured by event cameras.
- Published
- 2021
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