Abstract
Most of the existing gaze tracking schemes with high accuracy and high speed depend on infra-red (IR) lights and multi-cameras, which leads to high complexity of apparatus and high cost. Besides, many proposed approaches hardly offer a full discussion and solution of eye blink issue. In this paper, we propose a novel gaze tracking scheme which is capable of tracking eye movements in high accuracy. Our scheme incorporates the eye corner information extracted using a novel eye corner detector. This detector is developed based on the Gabor Wavelet Transform and the Structure Tensor. Gabor Wavelet Transform decomposes an image in multi-scales and multi-orientations, thus is robust against lighting variation and tiny shift. We abstract the distribution statistics of the feature points in the eye region and re-express it as a connectivity graph. Based on such abstraction we propose a novel solution to the eye blink issue which obtains a high successful detection rate. After implementation, our scheme is proven to be accurate compared with the state of the art. Notably, only one web camera is employed in our scheme without any auxiliary light source or cameras.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Coutinho, F. L., Morimoto, C. H (2006). Free head motion eye gaze tracking using a single camera and multiple light sources. In Computer Graphics and Image Processing, 2006. SIBGRAPI’06. 19th Brazilian Symposium on (pp. 171–178). IEEE
Gao X, Sattar F, Venkateswarlu R (2007) Multiscale corner detection of gray level images based on log-gabor wavelet transform. Circ Syst Video Technol IEEE Transac 17(7):868–875
Guestrin ED, Eizenman E (2006) General theory of remote gaze estimation using the pupil center and corneal reflections. Biomed Eng IEEE Transac 53(6):1124–1133
Hansen DW, Ji Q (2010) In the eye of the beholder: a survey of models for eyes and gaze. Pattern Anal Mach Intell IEEE Transac 32(3):478–500
Harris C, Stephens M (1988) A combined corner and edge detector. Proc 4th Alvey Vision Conf 15:50
Hennessey, C., Noureddin, B., Lawrence, P (2006). A single camera eye-gaze tracking system with free head motion. In Proceedings of the 2006 symposium on Eye tracking research & applications (pp. 87–94). ACM
Kumar, N., Kohlbecher, S., Schneider, E (2009). A novel approach to video-based pupil tracking. In Systems, Man and Cybernetics, 2009. SMC 2009. IEEE International Conference on (pp. 1255–1262). IEEE
Lee, Tai S. (1996). Image Representation Using 2D Gabor wavelets. Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, IEEE Transactions on (IEEE), 18 (10)
Li, D., Babcock, J., Parkhurst, D. J (2006). openEyes: a low-cost head-mounted eye-tracking solution. In Proceedings of the 2006 symposium on Eye tracking research & applications (pp. 95–100). ACM
Li, D., Winfield, D., Parkhurst, D. J (2005). Starburst: A hybrid algorithm for video-based eye tracking combining feature-based and model-based approaches. In Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition-Workshops, 2005. CVPR Workshops. IEEE Computer Society Conference on (pp. 79–79). IEEE
Manjunath BS, Ma WY (1996) Texture features for browsing and retrieval of image data. Pattern Anal Mach Intell IEEE Transac 18(8):837–842
Ramanauskas N, Daunys G, Dervinis D (2008) Investigation of calibration techniques in video based eye tracking system. In: In Computers Helping People with Special Needs. Springer, Berlin Heidelberg, pp. 1208–1215
Shi, J., Tomasi, C (1994). Good features to track. In Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 1994. Proceedings CVPR’94., 1994 I.E. Computer Society Conference on (pp. 593–600). IEEE
Timm, F., Barth, E (2011). Accurate Eye Centre Localisation by Means of Gradients. In VISAPP (pp. 125–130)
Torricelli D, Conforto S, Schmid M, D’Alessio T (2008) A neural-based remote eye gaze tracker under natural head motion. Comput Methods Prog Biomed 92(1):66–78
Valenti R, Sebe N, Gevers T (2012) Combining head pose and eye location information for gaze estimation. Image Process IEEE Transac 21(2):802–815
Villanueva A, Cabeza R (2008) A novel gaze estimation system with one calibration point. Syst Man Cybern Part B: Cybern IEEE Transac 38(4):1123–1138
Yamazoe, H., Utsumi, A., Yonezawa, T., Abe, S (2008). Remote gaze estimation with a single camera based on facial-feature tracking without special calibration actions. In Proceedings of the 2008 symposium on Eye tracking research & applications (pp. 245–250). ACM
Zhu Z, Ji Q (2007) Novel eye gaze tracking techniques under natural head movement. Biomed Eng IEEE Transac 54(12):2246–2260
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank all reviewers for their helpful suggestions and constructive comments. The work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.61202154, 61133009), the National Basic Research Project of China (No. 2011CB302203), Shanghai Pujiang Program (No.13PJ1404500), the Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality Program (No. 13511505000), the Open Projects Program of National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, and the Open Project Program of the State Key Lab of CAD&CG (Grant No. A1401), Zhejiang University, the HKIEd-Internal Research Grant (ref. RG 77/2013-2014R), the grant of University of Macau under Grant No. MYRG150 (Y1-L2)-FST11-WW and MYRG2014-00139-FST.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Appendix
Appendix
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Xia, L., Sheng, B., Wu, W. et al. Accurate gaze tracking from single camera using gabor corner detector. Multimed Tools Appl 75, 221–239 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-014-2288-4
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-014-2288-4