Improvement of PupilMouse

The authors have already proposed `PupilMouse', which was supposed to be very useful for the severely handicapped people who can move their heads, to operate a PC and so on. In PupilMouse, pupil motion between frames detected by a video camera is reflected to cursor motion on a PC screen and whether each of the right and left pupils are detected or not is reflected to the push states of the corresponding buttons of a two button mouse. Accordingly, users can move the cursor on the PC screen by head rotation, and can click by closing their single eye. If they rotate their head while closing one eye, they can drag. In the previous study, corrective eyeglasses were a problem for PupilMouse operation because the pupil cannot be detected when the eyeglass reflection of the light sources is lying on the pupil image. In the present study, methods for solving the problem are proposed. First, the camera was set at a little separate position from the screen so that the eyeglass reflection does not appear. Moreover, basically, the cursor on the display is controlled so that the cursor always appears just in front of the face of a user. To do this, the algorithm for PupilMouse was improved. As a result, a subject wearing eyeglasses came to be able to use PupilMouse enough.