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Accurate gaze tracking from single camera using gabor corner detector

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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.

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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.

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Correspondence to Bin Sheng.

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Appendix

Table 3 The subject’s raw data of each point were accumulated and the theoretical value (TV), the mean value (MV), the mean deviation (MD) and the error value (ERR) were calculated and listed below. The left value in parenthesis is the horizontal error while the left vertical. They all have the same unit in degree

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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

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-014-2288-4

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