Extraction of Visual Information from Images of Eyes

Abstract

Our eyes are crucial to providing us with an enormous amount of information about our physical world. What is less often explored is the fact that the eye also conveys equally rich information to an external observer. Figure 7.1 shows two images of eyes. One can see a building in the example on the left and a person’s face in the example on the right. At the same time, we can see that the mapping of the environment within the appearance of the eye is complex and depends on how the eye is imaged. In [633], highlights in an eye were used to locate three known point sources. The sources were then used to apply photometric stereo and relight the face. Extensive previous work has also been done on using eyes to estimate gaze [154,468,588,603,693,706] and to identify people from their iris textures [116, 185]1. However, virtually no work has been done on using eyes to interpret the world surrounding the person to whom the eye belongs.