METHOD FOR AUTOMATICALLY LOCATING EYES IN AN IMAGE

A digital image processing method for locating human eyes in a digital image, includes the steps of detecting a skin colored region in the image; detecting human iris color pixels in the skin colored region; forming initial estimates of eye positions using the locations of the detected iris color pixels in the skin colored region; estimating the size of each eye based on the distance between the estimated initial eye positions; forming a first search window for one eye, the center of the window being the estimated initial position for the one eye and the size of the window being proportional to the estimated size of the one eye; and employing a template to locate an eye in the first search window.