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July 29, 2004NY TimesWHAT'S NEXT Fleeting Experience, Mirrored in Your EyesBy ANNE EISENBERG POETS, lovers, and amateur psychologists have long looked deep into people's eyes to read their thoughts and feelings. But the reflections in full view on the surface of the eye rarely receive much attention.Now two Columbia University scientists have come up with a computer-based way to extract detailed information from the fleeting images of the world mirrored on the curved surface of the eye.Shree K. Nayar, a professor of computer science and co-director of the Columbia Vision and Graphics Center, took high-resolution photographs of people that include their eyes and, in particular, the transparent part of the eye called the cornea. Then, with a postdoctoral researcher, Ko Nishino, he devised computer algorithms that analyze the images reflected in these natural mirrors, revealing a wealth of information. The system can automatically recover wide-angle views of what people are looking at, including panoramic details to the left, right and even slightly behind them. It can also calculate where people are gazing - for instance, at a single smiling face in a crowd. Because the algorithms can track exactly where a person is looking, the system may one day find use in surveillance cameras that spot suspicious behavior or in interfaces for quadriplegics who use their gaze to operate a computer.http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/29/technolo...its/29next.html