Status: Completed
There are people that are so severely paralyzed that they
only have the ability to control the muscles in their eyes.
Communication is limited to the interpretation of eye movements.
Currently available human-computer interface systems
are often intrusive, require special hardware, or use
active infrared illumination. We present a system that runs
on an average PC with video input from an inexpensive USB
camera. The face is tracked using multi-scale template correlation.
Symmetry between left and right eyes is exploited
to detect if the computer user is looking at the camera, or
off to the left or right side. The detected eye direction can
then be used to control applications such as spelling programs
or games. We developed the game "BlockEscape" to
gather quantitative results to evaluate our interface system
with test subjects. We also compared our system to a mouse
substitution interface.
Appears in the proceedings of the 2004 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshop (CVPRW'04), Volume 10: Workshop on Real-Time Vision for Human-Computer Interaction (RTV4HCI), Washington, D.C., pp. 159-166, Washington, D.C., June 2004
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