Controling cursor through eye movement

Replies

• 

  Kaustubh Katdare

  Thread moved to new post and edited the title. Let me know if it looks Ok.
• 

  icehari

  your new project is amazing..
  congratulations for future succ
• 

  Ashraf HZ

  Nice concept!
  
  Would you take into account head movement? Or will the camera be tracking the eyes relative to it?
• 

  Jivesh

  Yes, we have to take the head movements into consideration, otherwise it would be very difficult for the user to control the mouse. I am thinking about a differential approach, where I would take the difference of the centre of the eye and the cornea and use this difference as the coordinates for mouse movement. In this way if the user moves his/her head, keeping the eyes at the centre, the mouse will remain at the centre as the input to the mouse driver is (0,0).
  This is one design approach.
  
  In another design, which seems to be a bit more sophisticated, I was thinking of using a camera mounted very close to the eye. In this method, the user has to constantly wear a gadget on his/her head, with an IR emitter radiating rays on one of the eyes. Additional sensors have to be used in this case to take into account the head movements, but the advantage here is that only the eye is photographed in the image and hence less filtering and processing is required as compared to the previous method.
• 

  Ashraf HZ

  I see, those are interesting approaches. What kind of camera would you use to capture the eyes?
  
  I'm thinking you'll need a really high resolution video, because you are talking about really precise movements of the eyes. At the moment, I can only think of those CCD cameras with a Firewire output to the computer. Normal webcams would definitely not work in this case.
• 

  Jivesh

  Sorry for replying so late. How about zooming the image, filtering or thresholding it and then using morphological techniques to track the eye. The normal webcams have a frame rate of about 30. Can that work?
• 

  Ashraf HZ

  Its better you put the camera close to the eyes. I would not recommend zooming, unless the webcam has very high resolution.
  
  Thresholding might work, but you'll risk losing some details. You'll need to perform some trial and error I suppose. What about edge detection?
  
  If you already have a webcam, use the free image processing software by RoboRealm to test the threshold out and see if it still retains the required details.