Date Available

11-2-2011

Year of Publication

2011

Degree Name

Master of Science in Electrical Engineering (MSEE)

Document Type

Thesis

College

Engineering

Department

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

First Advisor

Dr. Sen Ching Samson Cheung

Abstract

Tracking gaze of an individual provides important information in understanding the behavior of that person. Gaze tracking has been widely used in a variety of applications from tracking consumers gaze fixation on advertisements, controlling human-computer devices, to understanding behaviors of patients with various types of visual and/or neurological disorders such as autism. Gaze pattern can be identified using different methods but most of them require the use of specialized equipments which can be prohibitively expensive for some applications. In this dissertation, we investigate the possibility of using sclera and iris regions captured in a webcam sequence to estimate gaze pattern. The sclera and iris regions in the video frame are first extracted by using an adaptive thresholding technique. The gaze pattern is then determined based on areas of different sclera and iris regions and distances between tracked points along the irises. The technique is novel as sclera regions are often ignored in eye tracking literature while we have demonstrated that they can be easily extracted from images captured by low-cost camera and are useful in determining the gaze pattern. The accuracy and computational efficiency of the proposed technique is demonstrated by experiments with human subjects.

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