Simple Blink/Eye closed detector

David BoccabellaDavid Boccabella Moderator
edited January 2014 in Animatronics
I wondered how simple it would be to detect when an eye was opened or closed so one could get an animatronic counterpart to do the same.

I found this little device
http://littlebirdelectronics.com/products/qre1113-line-sensor-breakout-analog
 which is very simple to use.

It consist of a IR emitter and an IR detector. The IR output is very low so there is no concerns about eye damage.  I put it close to the edge of one of my eyelids and as I closed my eye.. or blinked I could see a change in the voltage on the output. With fine tuning it should be possible to detect the degree of openess.. But atleast it can detect Open and Closed :)

Enjoy..
Marc

Comments

  • Adam WilsonAdam Wilson ✭
    Just as a note to this, I have done some work with OpenCV detecting eye position with a webcam and mirroring that to a mechanical counterpart.  It is hard to detect "natural" blinking with normal cameras but you can always blink a bit slower on purpose and it will detect it fine.  

    http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/26897/TrackEye-Real-Time-Tracking-Of-Human-Eyes-Using-a

    hope that helps, once implemented it takes a lot of work out of setting up a bunch of radio controllers.

     you can get a Raspberry Pi (linux computer $35) the webcam ($25) and adafruit's 16 channel servo breakout board ($20) and do some pretty amazing things.  
  • David BoccabellaDavid Boccabella Moderator
    Thanks Adam
    I have played around with OpenCV and SimpleCV. One project I am workiong on involves mapping dots around the mouth for real time lip syncing. a.k.a Avatar but for a LOT cheaper.

    One can use the RPi but I have found that it's speed is a serious issue for more processor intensive applications. With the RPi I was getting about one frame a sec processing and that was using an intelligent webcam that pre proccessed and running at about 320x240 res.

    Even the Beaglebone Black did not improve this by much. However I found this little powerhouse

    http://hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=G137510300620

    It's a quad A15 which gives me the processing to do about 5+ frames per second.  Plus the option to add other interfaces etc.

    Very nice and small which makes it portable for self contained application.

    Hope this helps



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