Eye and Iris Detection Using Projection and Radial Symmetry Transform

This paper presents an eye and iris detection algorithm for human facial images. The authors combine three features of the eye to develop the algorithm: 1) the pixels surrounding the eyes are more variable than other parts of the face; 2) eye pixels are darker than their neighbors; 3) eyes often exhibit radial symmetric properties. Through the first feature, two rough regions of both eyes are detected on the face. Eye masks are then formed based on the second feature, and a fast radial symmetry transform is applied to the two rough regions of both eyes. Finally, accurate iris centers are located by searching the maximum value of the radial symmetry transform results. Using 450 human facial images from the Caltech face database, experiments show that the success rate of the proposed method is 91.7%. The effectiveness of the method was also verified through detection of video frames.