| dc.description.abstract | The objective of this thesis is to present a set of techniques integrated into a low-cost eye gaze tracking system. An eye gaze tracking
system is a system that estimate the direction of the human’s eye gaze. That is, it finds where a person looks. Although the eye gaze tracking system has many potential applications, one of its main applications is to help the physically and vocally disabled. For some disabled persons, an extreme disability such as severe cerebral palsy or amyotrophic lateral
sclerosis (ALS) deprives them of the use of their limbs and facial muscles.If eye motion is unaffected, the person could rely on an eye gaze tracking system to attain or regain some degrees of independent communication and control. There are several ways of tracking the direction of the
eye-gaze by using reflection of light,electrooculogram (EOG), or contact
lens, etc. Each of them has its own advantages and disadvantages such as high complexity, high cost, and invasive way. Since the main application of the proposed system is to help the disabled to manipulate computers more easily, price and complexity are the two chief considerations. The proposed system consists of only one low-cost web camera which is
located directly above the center of the display screen. A five-stage algorithm is proposed to estimate the eye gaze direction. At the first stage,an efficient face detection filter based on the skin color is employed to locate the user’s face. Then three projection histograms are integrated to find the eyes. After this, the FCM algorithm is employed to locate the pupils. Then the eye gaze direction is computed by inferencing a simple fuzzy systems consisting of 9 fuzzy rules. Finally, the computed eye gaze
directions are used to manipulate the computer. Several experiments were used to test the performance of the prototype system. | en_US |