Progress on an Eye Tracking System Using Multiple Near-Infrared Emitter/Detector Pairs with Special Application to Efficient Eye-Gaze Communication

摘要

The "Owl" eye tracker uses a small sensor (Figure 1) mounted close to the user's eye, bouncing multiple channels of unfocused near-infrared light on and around the user's eye to determine direction of gaze. The hardware makes no assumption about what structures reflect light from any particular emitter/detector combination - it is thus not subject to the setup and adjustment constraints of techniques like limbus reflectometry. Specifically, specular and diffuse reflections may come from the iris/cornea, sclera, eye lids, and surrounding tissue, rather than from specific regions of the eye. Whereas conventional gaze-trackers use accurately aimed and focused hardware along with detailed assumptions about the geometry of the eye, the Owl's approach is to use software to extract useful information from the raw unfocused data.