GazeGuide: An Eye-Gaze-Guided Active Immersive UAV Camera

Abstract

Over the years, gaze input modality has been an easy and demanding human–computer interaction (HCI) method for various applications. The research of gaze-based interactive applications has advanced considerably, as HCIs are no longer constrained to traditional input devices. In this paper, we propose a novel immersive eye-gaze-guided camera (called GazeGuide) that can seamlessly control the movements of a camera mounted on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) from the eye-gaze of a remote user. The video stream captured by the camera is fed into a head-mounted display (HMD) with a binocular eye tracker. The user’s eye-gaze is the sole input modality to maneuver the camera. A user study was conducted considering the static and moving targets of interest in a three-dimensional (3D) space to evaluate the proposed framework. GazeGuide was compared with a state-of-the-art input modality remote controller. The qualitative and quantitative results showed that the proposed GazeGuide performed significantly better than the remote controller.