Development of an eye gaze interface system and improvement of cursor control function

This paper introduces an eye gaze interface system for controlling a mouse cursor on the computer display. The system consists of a small video camera to capture an eye image and a computer to detect the eye gaze from the image and to calculate the position of the cursor to be displayed depending on the detected eye gaze. In order to develop an easy-to-use system, consideration of involuntary and voluntary eye blink is necessary for practical use. Improvement of the stability of eye gaze-controlled cursor movement is also important. In this paper, smooth cursor control using a moving average filter and detection of involuntary and voluntary eye blink are described. The experiments show the usefulness of the proposed methods for quick and stable mouse cursor control. In the experiment of cursor pointing accuracy, distances between the target and the cursor point are about 30 pixels in horizontal direction and 20 pixels in vertical direction.