Toward the design of a low cost vision-based gaze tracker for interaction skill acquisition

Edwige Pissaloux, Andrea Carbone and Francis Martinez

Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris 6), ISIR, France
E-mail: Edwige.Pissaloux@upmc.fr, carbone@isir.upmc.fr, martinez@isir.upmc.fr

Abstract

The human gaze is a basic mean for non verbal interaction between humans; however, in several situations, especially in the context of upper limb motor impairments, the gaze constitutes also an alternative mean for human’s interactions with the environment (real or virtual). Mastering these interactions through specific tools, requires frequently the acquisition of new skills and understanding of mechanisms which allow to acquire the necessary skills. Therefore the technological tool is a key for new interaction skills’ acquisition. This paper presents a tool for interaction skill acquisition via a gaze. The proposed gaze tracker is a low cost head mounted system based on vision technology “only”. The system hardware specifications and the status of the gaze tracker design are presented; the dedicated algorithm for eye detection and tracking, and an improvement of G. Zelinsky model for eye movement predication during the search of a predefined object in an image are outlined. Results of the software preliminary evaluation are presented.