A Novel Approach to Estimate Gaze Direction in Eye Gaze HCI System

In order to realize head-free eye-gaze tracking human-computer interaction(HCI) system, a novel gaze direction estimation method is proposed in this paper. The point of gaze (PoG) is estimated by building up the geometric mapping relationship between the vector from the infrared light to the eye-gaze point and the vector from the purkinje spot to the pupil center in 3D space. To calculate the position of purkinje spot and pupil center in 3D space, user-dependent parameters, such as the radius of the cornea and the inter-pupillary distance, should be calibrated before using the eye-gaze tracking HCI system. Different from most monocular(2D) vision techniques simplifying the 3D eye-gaze tracking issue into 2D issue, the proposed method uses a single camera to estimate PoG on 2D plane by means of 3D spatial geometry mapping. Experiments on PoG estimation have been done and the results suggest the proposed method is feasible.