Recently, eye-gaze tracking systems have been used in many applications. For the disabled, an eye gaze direction is useful to express their will. In the thesis, a real-time eye-gaze tracking system for the disabled is presented. There are many types of eye-gaze tracking systems. But none of them is available in all environments. For more availability, an eye gaze tracking system, which detects pupil of an eye while allowing free head motions, is introduced. When infrared rays are emitted to a person's eye, the intensity of a pupil is changed. This variation is detected by a CCD camera equipped on the head mounted structure of the proposed eye gaze tracking system. The search region is determined first in the gray level image captured by the CCD camera. P-tile method, component labeling and counting function are used to determine the search region. To fmd the pupil of the eye in the search region, morphological operation is used. After finding the pupil, the center of the pupil is calculated. To find the eye gaze direction, the head orientation should be compensated. In order to fmd the head orientation, a magnetic sensor is used. The center of eye rotation is calculated using both head orientation and coordinate transformations. The eye gaze direction is determined after completing calibration process. Experimental results show that the eye gaze direction can be successfully found in various illumination conditions in real time and the proposed eye-gaze tracking system shows the feasibility of a computer interface for the disabled.
