A Study on Eye Gaze Estimation Method Based on Cornea Model of Human Eye

In this paper, we propose a new gaze estimation method by analyzing the cornea surface model which is estimated through three dimensional analysis of human eye in HMD (Head Mounted Display) environments. This paper has four advantages over previous works. First, in order to obtain accurate gaze position, we use a cornea sphere model based on Gullstrand eye scheme. Second, we calculate the 3D position of the cornea sphere and a gaze vector by using a camera, three collimated IR-LEDs and one illuminated IRLED. Third, three coordinates such as camera, monitor and eye coordinates are unified, which can simplify the complex 3D converting calculation and allow for calculation of the 3D eye position and gaze position on a HMD monitor. Fourth, a simple user dependent calibration method is proposed by gazing at one position of HMD monitor based on Kappa compensation. Experimental results showed that the average gaze estimation error of the proposed method was 0.89 degrees.