A miniature head-mounted camera for measuring eye closure

Abstract

This paper describes a miniature camera module for capturing close-up video of one eye and the image processing steps to locate the pupil and measure eye closure from this video. This camera is one component of a multi-sensory device for measuring drowsiness and detecting complete momentary lapses of responsiveness.

We describe a flood-fill-based algorithm for locating the pupil and shape-based criteria for determining whether the pupil is partly covered by the eyelid. Percentage eye closure (PERCLOS) is implemented as an example of a meaningful measurement that can be derived from this extracted pupil data. Preliminary results show that the algorithm produces output very close to that obtained by manual frame-by-frame classification of the eye video.