Development of a robust active infrared-based eye tracker

Eye tracking has a number of useful applications ranging from monitoring a vehicle driver for possible signs of fatigue, providing an interface to enable severely disabled people to communicate with others, to a number of medical applications. Most eye tracking applications require a non-intrusive way of tracking the eyes, making a camera-based approach a natural choice. However, although significant progress has been made in recent years, modern eye tracking systems still have not overcome a number of challenges including eye occlusions, variable ambient lighting conditions and inter-subject variability. This study describes the development of a robust real-time camera-based eye tracker, which is mainly suitable for indoor applications. The developed eye tracker relies on the so-called bright/dark pupil effect for both the eye detection and eye tracking phases. Furthermore, this study also aims to determine how strong the bright/dark pupil effect is among people from an African ethnical background, a feature that is very relevant to a country such as South Africa.