Design of a virtual keyboard based on iris tracking

The development of man-machine interfaces to control devices with the eyes could be of great impact in handicapped individuals. In this paper a non-obstructive interface is proposed to detect and track iris position based on digital image processing techniques, templates and a reference point mounted near the eye. The position of the iris is detected in four steps: reference detection, iris center detection, iris position computation relative to the reference and determination of the eye position within the virtual keyboard. The position of the iris is projected over a virtual keyboard and it is determined the maximum number of keys that the system is able to discriminate. The percentage of iris correct detection in four different video sequences of 803, 710, 913, 849 frames, respectively were above 98.2%. The reference detection was 100% correct. A virtual keyboard was built allowing 12 horizontal and 8 vertical keys.