A Video Database of Human Faces under Near Infra-Red Illumination for Human Computer Interaction Aplications
This provides a valuable resource for researchers developing algorithms for face and eye tracking in NIR applications, though it is incremental as it focuses on data creation rather than new methods.
The paper addresses the lack of standard databases for validating algorithms in Human Computer Interaction by creating a video database of 60 subjects under Near Infra-Red illumination, which includes variations in head orientations, facial expressions, occlusions, and lighting.
Human Computer Interaction (HCI) is an evolving area of research for coherent communication between computers and human beings. Some of the important applications of HCI as reported in literature are face detection, face pose estimation, face tracking and eye gaze estimation. Development of algorithms for these applications is an active field of research. However, availability of standard database to validate such algorithms is insufficient. This paper discusses the creation of such a database created under Near Infra-Red (NIR) illumination. NIR illumination has gained its popularity for night mode applications since prolonged exposure to Infra-Red (IR) lighting may lead to many health issues. The database contains NIR videos of 60 subjects in different head orientations and with different facial expressions, facial occlusions and illumination variation. This new database can be a very valuable resource for development and evaluation of algorithms on face detection, eye detection, head tracking, eye gaze tracking etc. in NIR lighting.