Researches Of Calibration-free Method For Gaze Interaction Technique

With the popularization and application of computer and portable electronic device, the research of how to improve the naturalness of human-computer interaction is taken more and more attention. The research of eye tracking technology has become the hot research field both in China and abroad. It has been widely applied to medical diagnosis, psychological measurement, military research and evaluation of advertising, etc.Although the eye tracking technology has seen a recent explosion of interest, and has developed rapidly, there are still some problems in the practical application of the eye tracking technology:complex and high cost of the hardware equipment of the system; requiring calibration process, and bad user experience of the system. Moreover, because in recent years, mobile phones, tablets and other mobile electronic devices get involved and play an essential role in people’s daily life, it is of great significance to develop the eye tracking system aiming at individual or fixed users of mobile electronic devices.For the sake of those problems, a calibration-free method for gaze interaction is proposed as the main research content. This thesis first introduces the basic knowledge of eye tracking, including the research background, research status, system architecture, the structure of the human eye and eye movement features. And then introduces the visual attention models, and an auxiliary calibration method based on visual attention model is proposed; According to the characteristics of eye movement and the using experience of eye tracking system, this thesis proposes a calibration simplified method for gaze interaction based on using experience, to reduce the complexity of calibration; At last, this thesis introduces the potential application of eye tracking system in mobile electronic devices.The main contributions of our thesis are shown as following:(1) An auxiliary calibration method based on visual attention model is proposed. The fixation image salient is extracted based on visual attention model. Based on the relationship between the image salient and the characteristics of eye movement, the auxiliary calibration method can be used for eye tracking system.(2) Based on the accumulation and analysis of the using experience, the relationship between the reference calibration point and the estimation errors of the other calibration points can be established. It provides the theoretical basis for the system calibration.(3) Based on the relationship between the calibration points of the using experience, a calibration simplified method for gaze interaction based on using experience is proposed. The user in the stage of calibration of simplification needs to fixate on only the reference calibration point in the step of calibration. And the calibration relationship of the calibration points are obtained corresponding to the current position, compensate the estimation errors of the gaze tracking method and the angle difference between the visual axis and optical axis. This method improves the accuracy and the degree of freedom further.(4) Some creative applications of gaze tracking systems in mobile electronic devices are proposed. Because the users for mobile electronic devices are basically fixed and the using distance is relatively stable, the applications of gaze tracking systems in specific group of users and one specific user are proposed. It promotes the application of the gaze tracking techniques to be more extensive.