Method of ensuring eye-to eye contact in multi-view video conference

Eye-to-eye contact is considered to be important in understanding each other in immersive video conference in the future. In this letter, a new method to guarantee participants eye-to-eye contact is presented. In the method, it is supposed that the listener is directly facing the display screen. So the technique of ensuring eye-to-eye contact can be alternatively carried out by detecting which camera the speaker's face directs to. The frontal-view face image from the camera is determined by the location of eyes in the face region. The face regions and eyes location both are detected in each camera image. In the eye detection, the analysis of the mean of gray levels, the variance of gray levels, the mean of gradients of the gray levels and chroma information in the eye window are combinatively used. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms can detect eyes location in real-time, correctly determine which camera image is the frontal-view face image, thereby providing an effect of eye-to-eye contact.