Face typing: Vision-based perceptual interface for hands-free text entry with a scrollable virtual keyboard

We present a novel vision-based perceptual user interface for hands-free text entry that utilizes face detection and visual gesture detection to manipulate a scrollable virtual keyboard. A thorough experimentation was undertaken to quantitatively define a performance of the interface in hands-free pointing, selection and scrolling tasks. The experiments were conducted with nine participants in laboratory conditions. Several face and head gestures were examined for detection robustness and user convenience. The system gave a reasonable performance in terms of high gesture detection rate and small false alarm rate. The participants reported that a new interface was easy to understand and operate. Encouraged by these results, we discuss advantages and constraints of the interface and suggest possibilities for design improvements.