EURASIP Journal on Image and Video Processing
Volume 2007 (2007), Article ID 65184, 9 pages
doi:10.1155/2007/65184
Research Article

Automatic Eye Winks Interpretation System for Human-Machine Interface

Che Wei-Gang,1 Chung-Lin Huang,1,2 and Wen-Liang Hwang3

1Department of Electrical Engineering, National Tsing-Hua University, Hsin-Chu, Taiwan
2Department of Informatics, Fo-Guang University, I-Lan, Taiwan
3Institute of Information Science, Academic Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan

Received 2 January 2007; Revised 30 April 2007; Accepted 21 August 2007

Academic Editor: Alice Caplier

Copyright © 2007 Che Wei-Gang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This paper proposes an automatic eye-wink interpretation system for human-machine interface to benefit the severely handicapped people. Our system consists of (1) applying the support vector machine (SVM) to detect the eyes, (2) using the template matching algorithm to track the eyes, (3) using SVM classifier to verify the open or closed eyes and convert the eye winks into a sequence of codes (0 or 1), and (4) applying the dynamic programming to translate the code sequence to a certain valid command. Different from the previous eye-gaze tracking methods, our system identifies the open or closed eye, and then interprets the eye winking as certain commands for human-machine interface. In the experiments, our system demonstrates better performance as well as higher accuracy.