Eye-controlled Virtual Keyboard

Abstract

Living in the age of digital technology, we have much convenience and fun with use of computers as they highly enhance our working and learning efficiency and easily solve the problems we encounter. However, it may not happen to people with physical disability because of their difficulties of providing computer input. For instance, when they want to type some words on their computers, they may find it hard to use the keyboard with their hands due to their physical disability. Nevertheless, most computers in the current market are usually not disabled-friendly enough. Low demand in the market, difficulties and high cost of design and implementation on both software and hardware are the main concerns of developing assistive devices for the disabled. This project aims at developing an eye-controlled virtual keyboard to deal with the difficulty of using a physical keyboard for people with physical disability. The eye-controlled virtual keyboard is an application for Mac OS X, including the following functions: Automatically detecting a user's pupils using a notebook camera. Tracking the user's pupils when the user is moving the eyes. Estimating the screen positions where the user is currently looking at. Converting the screen positions into specific virtual keys. Enabling the user to enter letters, numbers and punctuation to other software.