Eye gaze tracking based directional control interface for interactive applications

Abstract

This paper proposes an unobtrusive and calibration-free framework towards eye gaze tracking based interactive directional control interface for desktop environment using simple webcam under unconstrained settings. The proposed eye gaze tracking involved hybrid approach designed by combining two different techniques based upon both supervised and unsupervised methods wherein the unsupervised image gradients method computes the iris centers over the eye regions extracted by the supervised regression based algorithm. Experiments performed by the proposed hybrid approach to detect eye regions along with iris centers over challenging face image datasets exhibited exciting results. Similar approach for eye gaze tracking worked well in real-time by using a simple web camera. Further, PC based interactive directional control interface based upon iris position has been designed that works without needing any prior calibrations unlike other Infrared illumination based eye trackers. The proposed work may be useful to the people with full body motor disabilities, who need interactive and unobtrusive eye gaze control based applications to live independently.