Eye-Gaze Detection from Monocular Camera Image Using Parametric Template Matching

In the coming ubiquitous-computing society, an eyegaze interface will be one of the key technologies as an input device. Most of the conventional eyegaze tracking algorithms require specific light sources, equipments, devices, etc. In a previous work, the authors developed a simple eye-gaze detection system using a monocular video camera. This paper proposes a fast eye-gaze detection algorithm using the parametric template matching. In our algorithm, the iris extraction by the parametric template matching is applied to the eye-gaze detection based on physiological eyeball model. The parametric template matching can carry out an accurate sub-pixel matching by interpolating a few template images of a user’s eye captured in the calibration process for personal error. So, a fast calculation can be realized with keeping the detection accuracy. We construct an eye-gaze communication interface using the proposed algorithm, and verified the performance through key typing experiments using visual keyboard on display.