Real-time eye localization, blink detection, and gaze estimation system without infrared illumination

Gaze tracking systems have high potential to be used as natural user interface devices; however, the mainstream systems are designed with infrared illumination, which may be harmful for human eyes. In this paper, a real-time eye localization, blink detection, and gaze estimation system is proposed without infrared illumination. To deal with various lighting conditions and reflections on the iris, the proposed system is based on a continuously updated color model for robust iris detection. Moreover, the proposed algorithm employs both the simplified and the original eye images to achieve the balance between robustness and accuracy. Experimental results show that the proposed system can achieve the accuracy of 96.8% for blink detection and the accuracy of 1.973 degree for gaze estimation with the processing speed of 10-11fps. The performance is comparable to previous works with infrared illumination.