A face image processing apparatus is adapted to extract a retinal reflection image accurately and decide the opened and closed states of eyes correctly, regardless of reflection images of eyeglasses, which exist around the retinal reflection image. The face image processing apparatus includes a lighting unit 11 for irradiating a face of a person 1 to be detected, a photographing unit 10 for photographing a face image of the detected person 1, a binarization unit 21 for binarizing a variable-density (light and shade) image, a feature extracting unit 23 for extracting binarized white pixel regions, and an eye-state decision unit 24 for deciding the eye states of the detected person 1. The feature extracting unit 23 sets the most of entire white pixel regions as the retinal reflection image candidate regions, distinguishes and extracts the retinal reflection images and the reflection images according to an attribute of a previous screen by a correlation of the present screen candidates and the previous screen candidates, whereby a false detection of the reflection images can be prevented. At the same time, the feature extracting unit 23 creates the retinal reflection image candidates according to the relative positional relation of the left and right eyes, thereby extracting the retinal reflection images accurately through complementation of these two extractions, regardless of the reflection images such as the eye glasses which might exist around the retinal reflection images.
Blink detection face image processing apparatus utilizing retinal reflection image