Dans ce travail, nous avons abordé le problème d’estimation automatique du regard dans des environnements utilisateur sans contraintes. Ce travail s’inscrit dans la vision par ordinateur appliquée à l’analyse automatique du comportement humain. Plusieurs solutions industrielles sont aujourd’hui commercialisées et donnent des estimations précises du regard. Certaines ont des spécifications matérielles très complexes (des caméras embarquées sur un casque ou sur des lunettes qui filment le mouvement des yeux) et présentent un niveau d’intrusivité important, ces solutions sont souvent non accessible au grand public. Cette thèse vise à produire un système d’estimation automatique du regard capable d’augmenter la liberté du mouvement de l’utilisateur par rapport à la caméra (mouvement de la tête, distance utilisateur-capteur), et de réduire la complexité du système en utilisant des capteurs relativement simples et accessibles au grand public. Dans ce travail, nous avons exploré plusieurs paradigmes utilisés par les systèmes d’estimation automatique du regard. Dans un premier temps, Nous avons mis au point deux systèmes basés sur deux approches classiques: le premier basé caractéristiques et le deuxième basé semi apparence. L’inconvénient majeur de ces paradigmes réside dans la conception des systèmes d'estimation du regard qui supposent une indépendance totale entre l'image d'apparence des yeux et la pose de la tête. Pour corriger cette limitation, Nous avons convergé vers un nouveau paradigme qui unifie les deux blocs précédents en construisant un espace regard global, nous avons exploré deux directions en utilisant des données réelles et synthétiques respectivement. / In this thesis, we tackled the automatic gaze estimation problem in unconstrained user environments. This work takes place in the computer vision research field applied to the perception of humans and their behaviors. Many existing industrial solutions are commercialized and provide an acceptable accuracy in gaze estimation. These solutions often use a complex hardware such as range of infrared cameras (embedded on a head mounted or in a remote system) making them intrusive, very constrained by the user's environment and inappropriate for a large scale public use. We focus on estimating gaze using cheap low-resolution and non-intrusive devices like the Kinect sensor. We develop new methods to address some challenging conditions such as head pose changes, illumination conditions and user-sensor large distance. In this work we investigated different gaze estimation paradigms. We first developed two automatic gaze estimation systems following two classical approaches: feature and semi appearance-based approaches. The major limitation of such paradigms lies in their way of designing gaze systems which assume a total independence between eye appearance and head pose blocks. To overcome this limitation, we converged to a novel paradigm which aims at unifying the two previous components and building a global gaze manifold, we explored two global approaches across the experiments by using synthetic and real RGB-D gaze samples.

Dans ce travail, nous avons abordé le problème d’estimation automatique du regard dans des environnements utilisateur sans contraintes. Ce travail s’inscrit dans la vision par ordinateur appliquée à l’analyse automatique du comportement humain. Plusieurs solutions industrielles sont aujourd’hui commercialisées et donnent des estimations précises du regard. Certaines ont des spécifications matérielles très complexes (des caméras embarquées sur un casque ou sur des lunettes qui filment le mouvement des yeux) et présentent un niveau d’intrusivité important, ces solutions sont souvent non accessible au grand public. Cette thèse vise à produire un système d’estimation automatique du regard capable d’augmenter la liberté du mouvement de l’utilisateur par rapport à la caméra (mouvement de la tête, distance utilisateur-capteur), et de réduire la complexité du système en utilisant des capteurs relativement simples et accessibles au grand public. Dans ce travail, nous avons exploré plusieurs paradigmes utilisés par les systèmes d’estimation automatique du regard. Dans un premier temps, Nous avons mis au point deux systèmes basés sur deux approches classiques: le premier basé caractéristiques et le deuxième basé semi apparence. L’inconvénient majeur de ces paradigmes réside dans la conception des systèmes d'estimation du regard qui supposent une indépendance totale entre l'image d'apparence des yeux et la pose de la tête. Pour corriger cette limitation, Nous avons convergé vers un nouveau paradigme qui unifie les deux blocs précédents en construisant un espace regard global, nous avons exploré deux directions en utilisant des données réelles et synthétiques respectivement. / In this thesis, we tackled the automatic gaze estimation problem in unconstrained user environments. This work takes place in the computer vision research field applied to the perception of humans and their behaviors. Many existing industrial solutions are commercialized and provide an acceptable accuracy in gaze estimation. These solutions often use a complex hardware such as range of infrared cameras (embedded on a head mounted or in a remote system) making them intrusive, very constrained by the user's environment and inappropriate for a large scale public use. We focus on estimating gaze using cheap low-resolution and non-intrusive devices like the Kinect sensor. We develop new methods to address some challenging conditions such as head pose changes, illumination conditions and user-sensor large distance. In this work we investigated different gaze estimation paradigms. We first developed two automatic gaze estimation systems following two classical approaches: feature and semi appearance-based approaches. The major limitation of such paradigms lies in their way of designing gaze systems which assume a total independence between eye appearance and head pose blocks. To overcome this limitation, we converged to a novel paradigm which aims at unifying the two previous components and building a global gaze manifold, we explored two global approaches across the experiments by using synthetic and real RGB-D gaze samples.

Ophthalmology is a branch of medicine that deals with the anatomy, physiology and diseases of the eyeball and orbit. An ophthalmic device for the acquirement and recognition of a human eye characteristics was created by researchers from Faculty of Information Technology. This device can be used either for biometric purposes or for medical purposes as a support diagnostic device. To achieve proper functionality, device must be able to adjust platform position in order to align optic camera with patient's eye.  The main focus of this thesis is to design and implement an algorithm for eye centre localisation based on images of the patient's face. The first part of this thesis describes general methods for eye localisation and proposed solution. To achieve requested accuracy, combination of multiple methods is used with adjusted parameters based on platform's features. The second part describes implementation of proposed solution as well as platform control. Multiple databases were used for training and testing of the algorithm. The third part summarises performed experiments. The proposed algorithm was implemented in the C++ language, using OpenCV library. Accuracy and speed of proposed algorithm are suitable for developed platform. In the end, the results are discussed and further improvements are proposed.

Ophthalmology is the branch of medicine that deals with the anatomy, physiology and diseases of the eyeball and orbit. An ophthalmic device for acquirement and recognition of human eye characteristics was created by researchers from Faculty of Information Technology. This device can be used either for biometric purposes or for medical purposes as a support diagnostic device. To achieve proper functionality, device must be able to adjust platform position in order to align optic camera with patient's eye.  The main focus of this work is to design and implement an algorithm for eye centre localisation based on images of the patient's face. The first part of this thesis describes general methods for eye localisation and proposed solution. To achieve desired accuracy, combination of multiple methods is used with adjusted parameters based on platform's features. The second part describes implementation of proposed solution as well as platform control. Multiple databases were used for training and testing of the algorithm and the third part summarises performed experiments. The proposed algorithm was implemented in the C++ language, using OpenCV library. Accuracy and speed of proposed algorithm are suitable for developed platform. In the end, the results are discussed and further improvements are proposed.

Data augmentation is a technique that can be performed in various ways to improve the training of discriminative models. The recent developments in deep generative models offer new ways of augmenting existing data sets. In this thesis, a framework for augmenting annotated data sets with deep generative models is proposed together with a method for quantitatively evaluating the quality of the generated data sets. Using this framework, two data sets for pupil localization was generated with different generative models, including both well-established models and a novel model proposed for this purpose. The unique model was shown both qualitatively and quantitatively to generate the best data sets. A set of smaller experiments on standard data sets also revealed cases where this generative model could improve the performance of an existing discriminative model. The results indicate that generative models can be used to augment or replace existing data sets when training discriminative models. / Dataaugmentering är en teknik som kan utföras på flera sätt för att förbättra träningen av diskriminativa modeller. De senaste framgångarna inom djupa generativa modeller har öppnat upp nya sätt att augmentera existerande dataset. I detta arbete har ett ramverk för augmentering av annoterade dataset med hjälp av djupa generativa modeller föreslagits. Utöver detta så har en metod för kvantitativ evaulering av kvaliteten hos genererade data set tagits fram. Med hjälp av detta ramverk har två dataset för pupillokalisering genererats med olika generativa modeller. Både väletablerade modeller och en ny modell utvecklad för detta syfte har testats. Den unika modellen visades både kvalitativt och kvantitativt att den genererade de bästa dataseten. Ett antal mindre experiment på standardiserade dataset visade exempel på fall där denna generativa modell kunde förbättra prestandan hos en existerande diskriminativ modell. Resultaten indikerar att generativa modeller kan användas för att augmentera eller ersätta existerande dataset vid träning av diskriminativa modeller.