Pupil extraction system for Nystagmus diagnosis by using K-mean clustering and Mahalanobis distance technique

As vertigo is a type of dizziness, it causes by problem with nystagmus. Doctors can diagnosis this disease from observing the motion of inner eye. For Nystagmus diagnosis system, efficient and precise pupil extraction system is needed. This paper proposed a method of pupil extraction by using K-mean clustering and Mahalanobis distance. Image sequence is captured via infrared camera mounted on the binocular. Eye tracking algorithm is consisted of K-mean clustering and Mahalanobis Distance. Based on the darkness of pupil, K-means clustering algorithm is used to segment black pixels. Extracted region is pupil, however noise is occurred. The noisy data is eliminated by means of Mahalanobis distance technique. Then the pupil is extracted. For experimental result, 1869 frames from 9 image sequences are use to test the performance of the proposed method. Accuracy is 73.68%, precision is 3.18 pixels error.