Real-Time Eye Gaze Tracking Under Natural Head Movements
Introduction

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:

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.

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.

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.


Research Demos:

Real time eye gaze tracking demo 1
This demo shows that as the user is looking at different reference points around the screen, the gaze point can be estimated accurately via the proposed gaze tracking technique. 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.


Real time map control via the eye gaze demo
This demo shows that the eye gaze can be employed to control the computer cursor for browsing the map.