Object acquisition and selection using automatic scanning and eye blinks in an HCI system

Abstract

This paper presents an object acquisition and selection approach in human computer interaction systems. In this approach, objects placed over computer screen are automatically scanned and the user performs voluntary eye blinks for object selection when the focus comes over the object of interest. Here, scanning means moving the focus over objects placed on the computer screen one by one and the scanning time is the time taken to move focus from one object to the next object. The user is not required to perform any physical movement, the moving part is only the eye lids. A low cost webcam and MATLAB software with computer vision toolbox are required to implement the proposed approach. The performance of the proposed approach has been compared with the Camera Mouse for selection of text and graphic objects. The Camera Mouse utilizes facial feature tracking for mouse cursor control and dwell time for object selection. Three experiments were performed for evaluation of the proposed method in which ten healthy users voluntarily participated. The proposed method has given significantly better performance than the Camera Mouse when selection of text objects was performed in an html file. For selection of graphic objects placed on computer screen, where page scrolling is not required, no significant difference has been found in the performance of both the systems. The proposed method has also been evaluated for performing mouse analogous operations using eye blinks and a performance comparison has been made with state-of-the-art methods.