Patent ID: 8477996

Claim:
A method for finding the 3D coordinates of a pair of eyes in at least one face, comprising the following steps: a) Reception of image data comprising a sequence of at least one digital video signal from at least one image sensor; b) Finding eyes in the image data; c) Determining the 3D coordinates of the found eyes; d) Assignment to the found eyes to form a pair of eyes; and e) Output of the 3D coordinates of the pair of eyes; where the process of finding eyes in the image data comprises the following steps: f) Identification of one or multiple faces in the image data; g) Determining the 3D coordinates of at least one identified face; h) Definition of a first search area on the identified face; and i) Finding at least one eye in the first search area; wherein the process of finding at least one eye in the first search area comprises the following steps: j) Computing an expected size of a part of the eye depending on the distance of the identified face from the image data providing image sensor; k) Computing a greyscale value as a threshold for a segmentation in the first search area depending on the distance of the identified face from the image data providing image sensor; l) Pre-processing the first search area aiming to improve the contrast; m) Segmentation of the first search area after the pre-processing; n) Computing one or multiple combined regions in the segmented first search area, where the combined region is a collection of adjacent pixels with at least approximately identical greyscale value; o) Determining a size of each computed combined region; and p) Comparing the expected size of the part of the eye with the determined size of the combined region, where the combined region represents a found eye if the determined size of the combined region at least approximately corresponds with the expected size of the part of the eye.