Real-Time Eye Gaze Tracking Under Natural Head Movements

Eye gaze is defined as the line of sight of a person. It represents a person's focus of attention. Eye gaze tracking has been an active research topic for many decades because of its potential usages in various applications such as Human Computer Interaction (HCI), Virtual Reality, Eye Disease Diagnosis and Human Behavior Study, etc. Unlike most of the existing gaze tracking techniques, which often require a static head to work well and require a cumbersome calibration process for each person, our gaze tracker can perform robust and accurate gaze estimation under natural head movements with only one-time calibration. Specifically, when the head moves to a new position, the gaze mapping function at the new position can be automatically updated by the proposed dynamic computational head compensation model to accommodate the eye position changes. Our proposed method will dramatically increase the usability of the eye gaze tracking technology, and we believe that it is a big step for the eye tracker to be accepted as a natural computer input devices.

Publications:

(1) Zhiwei Zhu and Qiang Ji, " Novel Eye Gaze Tracking Techniques Under Natural Head Movement," to appear in IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering.
(2) Zhiwei Zhu, Qiang Ji, "Eye Gaze Tracking Under Natural Head Movements." International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR05), San Diego, CA, June 2005.
(3) Zhiwei Zhu, Qiang Ji, "Eye Gaze Tracking Under Natural Head Movements." International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR05), San Diego, CA, June 2005.
(4) Zhiwei Zhu, Qiang Ji, "Eye and Gaze Tracking for Interactive Graphic Display." Machine Vision and Applications, Pages 139-148, Vol.15, No.3, July 2004.
(5) Qiang Ji, Zhiwei Zhu, "Eye and Gaze Tracking for Interactive Graphic Display." 2nd International Symposium on Smart Graphics, Hawthorne, NY, USA, June 11-13, 2002.
(6) Soochan Kim and Q. Ji, Non-intrusive Eye Gaze Tracking Under Natural Head Movements, 26th Annual International Conference IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology, Sep., 2004

Demos:

Eye gaze tracking demo

Map control via eye gaze

Word reading via eye gaze

Note: in the first demo, the static cirles with different colors represent the reference objects that the user will look at. The blinking square that changes locations is the estimated gaze point, representing where the user is looking at.

Eye Gaze Tracking With a Monocular Camera and a Steering Mirror