  Real-time eyeblink detection in the wild can widely serve for fatigue
detection, face anti-spoofing, emotion analysis, etc. The existing research
efforts generally focus on single-person cases towards trimmed video. However,
multi-person scenario within untrimmed videos is also important for practical
applications, which has not been well concerned yet. To address this, we shed
light on this research field for the first time with essential contributions on
dataset, theory, and practices. In particular, a large-scale dataset termed
MPEblink that involves 686 untrimmed videos with 8748 eyeblink events is
proposed under multi-person conditions. The samples are captured from
unconstrained films to reveal "in the wild" characteristics. Meanwhile, a
real-time multi-person eyeblink detection method is also proposed. Being
different from the existing counterparts, our proposition runs in a one-stage
spatio-temporal way with end-to-end learning capacity. Specifically, it
simultaneously addresses the sub-tasks of face detection, face tracking, and
human instance-level eyeblink detection. This paradigm holds 2 main advantages:
(1) eyeblink features can be facilitated via the face's global context (e.g.,
head pose and illumination condition) with joint optimization and interaction,
and (2) addressing these sub-tasks in parallel instead of sequential manner can
save time remarkably to meet the real-time running requirement. Experiments on
MPEblink verify the essential challenges of real-time multi-person eyeblink
detection in the wild for untrimmed video. Our method also outperforms existing
approaches by large margins and with a high inference speed.
