Eye-gaze tracking: an approach to pupil tracking targeted to FPGAs

This paper presents results in the development of a light-weight, easily portable vision-based eye-gaze tracking device for use in the development of human adaptive mechatronic (HAM) devices. In particular, this paper focuses on the development of a two stage pupil centre locator based entirely on integer calculations. The first stage gives an approximate pupil location while the second stage refines the result of the first stage. This two stage approach allows graceful degradation - an approximate 1/sup st/ stage result can be used should 2/sup nd/ stage processing fail. Results from a software based implementation of this algorithm show that our integer based method has similar localization accuracy to floating point ellipse fitting techniques.