An energy minimization process for extracting eye feature based on deformable template

Eye feature extraction is of crucial importance for face recognition. Deformable template is an efficient model for this task. However, it usually suffers from the problem of local minima. To avoid local minima, in this paper, a new energy minimization process is proposed, which emphasizes on local properties of energy terms. The minimization process is divided into three steps. The iris is located firstly. Then the eye boundaries are adjusted. Finally, all energy terms are activated to tune the eye template. Each step needs not to be split to some sub-steps. Empirical comparison with other minimization processes shows the superiority of the proposed process in terms of both efficiency and accuracy.