Real Time Eye and Gaze Tracking

This paper describes preliminary results we have obtained in developing a computer vision system based on active IR illumination for real time gaze tracking for interactive graphic display. Unlike most of the existing gaze tracking techniques, which often require assuming a static head to work well and require a cumbersome calibration process for each person, our gaze tracker can perform robust and accurate gaze estimation without calibration and under rather significant head movement. This is made possible by a new gaze calibration procedure that identifies the mapping from pupil parameters to screen coordinates using the Generalized Regression Neural Networks (GRNN). With GRNN, the mapping does not have to be an analytical function and head movement is explicitly accounted for by the gaze mapping function. Furthermore, the mapping function can generalize to other individuals not used in the training. The effectiveness of our gaze tracker is demonstrated by preliminary experiments that involve gaze-contingent interactive graphic display.