The iBUG Eye Segmentation Dataset

This paper presents the first dataset for eye segmentation in low resolution images. Although eye segmentation has long been a vital preprocessing step in biometric applications, this work is the first to focus on low resolutions image that can be expected from a consumer-grade camera under conventional human-computer interaction and / or video-chat scenarios. Existing eye datasets have multiple limitations, including: (a) datasets only contain high resolution images; (b) datasets did not include enough pose variations; (c) a utility landmark ground truth did not be provided; (d) high accurate pixel-level ground truths had not be given. Our dataset meets all the above conditions and requirements for different segmentation methods. Besides, a baseline experiment has been performed on our dataset to evaluate the performances of landmark models (Active Appearance Model, Ensemble Regression Tree and Supervised Descent Method) and deep semantic segmentation models (Atrous convolutional neural network with conditional random field). Since the novelty of our dataset is to segment the iris and the sclera areas, we evaluate above models on sclera and iris only respectively in order to indicate the feasibility on eye-partial segmentation tasks. In conclusion, based on our dataset, deep segmentation methods performed better in terms of IOU-based ROC curves and it showed potential abilities on low-resolution eye segmentation task.