A NOVEL INFRARED GAZE TRACKING SYSTEM BASED ON NONUNIFORM INTERPOLATION

The gaze tracking system has become an active research field for handicapped persons as well as general people in recent years. The precise mapping method plays an important role in the system. In this paper, a novel infrared gaze tracking system based on nonuniform interpolation is proposed. In this system, the eye images for the computer to analyze are extracted under two infrared light sources and a charge-coupled device camera, and the users do not require wearing any device. First, the integral projection algorithm and canny edge detection are applied to extract the pupil boundary points from the captured eye images, and then the pupil center is computed using an efficient and accurate ellipse-fitting algorithm. Finally, to estimate where the user looks, a novel mapping method based on the nonuniform interpolation algorithm is proposed. In this mapping method, the complicated geometric eyeball model and the nonlinear mapping between the pupil center coordinates and computer monitor screen coordinates do not need to be taken into account. Experimental results show that the proposed mapping method is simple, fast and more accurate. Moreover, our system is the remote eye gaze tracking system. The users do not need to wear any device, which make the users feel more comfortable.