Image Transformation of Eye Areas for Synthesizing Eye-contacts in Video Conferencing

Recently, the spread of Web cameras has facilitated video-conferencing. Since a Web camera is usually located outside the display while the user looks at his/her partner in the display, there is a problem that they cannot establish eye contact with each other. Various methods have been proposed to solve this problem, but most of them required specific sensors. In this paper, we propose a method that transforms the eye areas to synthesize eye contact using a single camera that is commonly implemented in laptop computers and mobile phones. Concretely, we implemented a system which transforms the user’s eye areas in an image to his/her eye image with a straight gaze to the camera only when the user’s gaze falls in a range that the partner would perceive eye contact.