EyeFlow: pursuit interactions using an unmodified camera

We investigate the smooth pursuit eye movement based interaction using an unmodified off-the-shelf RGB camera. In each pair of sequential video frames, we compute the indicative direction of the eye movement by analyzing flow vectors obtained using the Lucas-Kanade optical flow algorithm. We discuss how carefully selected low vectors could replace the traditional pupil centers detection in smooth pursuit interaction. We examine implications of unused features in the eye camera imaging frame as potential elements for detecting gaze gestures. This simple approach is easy to implement and abstains from many of the complexities of pupil based approaches. In particular, EyeFlow does not call for either a 3D pupil model or 2D pupil detection to track the pupil center location. We compare this method to state-of-the-art approaches and ind that this can enable pursuit interactions with standard cameras. Results from the evaluation with 12 users data yield an accuracy that compares to previous studies. In addition, the benefit of this work is that the approach does not necessitate highly matured computer vision algorithms and expensive IR-pass cameras.