Real-Time Eye Tracking Using Heat Maps

Abstract

Communication in modern days has developed a lot, including wireless networks, Artificial Intelligence (AI) interaction, and human-computer interfaces. People with paralysis and immobile disorders face daily difficulties communicating with others and gadgets. Eye tracking has proven to promote accessible and accurate interaction compared to other complex automatic interactions. The project aims to develop an electronic eye blinker that integrates with the experimental setup to determine clinical pupil redundancy. The proposed solution comes up with an eye-tracking tool within an inbuilt laptop webcam that tracks the eye’s pupil in the given screen dimensions and generates heat maps on the tracked locations. These heat maps can denote a letter (in case of eye writing), an indication to click on that location (in case of gadget communication), or for blinking analysis. The proposed method achieves a perfect F-measure score of 0.998 to 1.000, which is comparatively more accurate and efficient than the existing technologies. The solution also provides an effective method to determine the eye's refractive error, which can replace the complex refractometers. Further, the spatially tracked coordinates obtained during the experiment can be used to analyze the patient’s blinking pattern, which, in turn, can detect retinal disorders and their progress during medication. One of the applications of the project is to integrate the derived model with a Brain-computer interface system to allow fast communications for the disabled.