Eye gaze tracking using corneal imaging and active illumination devices.

This paper shows a novel eye gaze tracking (EGT) technique using thecorneal imaging technique. Compared to the existing pupil center and pupil reflection techniques, our approach directly finds PoG in the reflected scene image at the human corneal surface. As a result, it does not suffer from the parallax issue and does not require per-setup system calibrations. To achieve this system, we develop following techniques: First, we use the idea of the gaze-reflection point (GRP), where light from the PoG in the scene reflects at the corneal surface into an eye image. Second, illuminating the whole scene or particular objects using coded structured light enables robust and accurate matching at the GRP to obtain the PoG in a scene image. For this purpose, we show two implementations: a special high-power IR LED-array projector and active LED markers. Experimental evaluation shows that the proposed scheme achieves considerable accuracy and successfully supports depth-varying environments as well as practical applications including observation in a conversation scene. We believe the proposed EGT technique has considerably large potential to solve major issues of current EGT systems, expands the application fields of the EGT and increases the usability of interactive systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]