Design a Real-Time Eye Tracker

Abstract

An eye tracker is a device for measuring eye positions and eye movement. During the past decades, various approaches have been presented for eye tracking systems such as helping disabled people in various tasks including communication, writing emails, and drawing, besides other applications such as cognitive studies, electronic games and commercial eye trackers. The eye tracking devices and the algorithms that track the gaze still need an improvement. Many critical problems arise from the fact that the eye tracker system does not retain its accuracy for a long period of time. Besides, the fact that the commercial eye trackers are expensive. The aim of this research work is to develop a typing by gaze system using a PS3 camera. The developed typing by gaze system uses eyes' gaze for typing on a virtual keyboard. As well, the developed system is tested using a built-in laptop camera and a mounted PS3 camera on an eyeglass. First, the system will detect the face from the video stream. Followed by eyes' pupil detection and tracking which has been achieved using template-matching technique and adaptive EigenEye method. In addition, a virtual keyboard has been designed based on a laptop-size keyboard with QWERTY layout. After the eye pupil is tracked, the system will take control of the mouse's cursor movement. Then the eye's gaze will become the pointing device and the selection of the focused key or button will be achieved by using dwell-time of 0.5seconds. The developed eye tacker is an affordable device and it has retained a good typing accuracy either by using the PS3 or the laptop camera. Hence, it can be used for several applications and especially for research purposes.