Gaze tracking for multimodal human-computer interaction

This paper discusses the problem of gaze tracking and its applications to multimodal human-computer interaction. The function of a gaze tracking system can be either passive or active. For example, a system can identify user's message target by monitoring the user's gaze, or the user could use his gaze to directly control an application or launch actions. We have developed a real-time gaze tracking system that estimates the 3D position and rotation (pose) of a user's head. We demonstrate the applications of the gaze tracker to human-computer interaction by two examples. The first example shows that gaze tracker can help speech recognition systems by switching language model and grammar based on user's gaze information. The second example illustrates the combination of the gaze tracker and a speech recognizer to view a panorama image.