2009-2010-Eye Gaze Interface

Eye-Gaze User Interface Project

by Tim van Elteren

The initial idea of the eye-gaze user interface was to use eye-gaze to control a PDF viewer to scroll through a document without using a mouse, keyboard or other regular user input. In this way a user would be able to read a document and scroll up or down the document by looking at the top or bottom of the current page.

To accomplish this concept the open source OpenCV vision library was used to perform the face and eye detection. The open source XPDF viewer would be used for viewing and scrolling through the document. The innovative interactive system consisted of a laptop with a standard webcam built in for the eye tracking.

Performing the face and eye detection, in combination with, the head pose estimation and calibration of the system proved to be a lot of work which is why the final connection with the viewer was not implemented. The final result showed the estimated eye gaze position on the screen by a colored dot. The calibration is essential in producing a well estimated position though the current results could probably be improved.

The project is based on the open source OpenGazer project. Especially linking the libraries is a very tiresome/troublesome task but the result is rewarding. Expanding the system, for example input to the complete Linux window system, are however challenging, very interesting to implement as a further improvement.