Iran's UT Researchers Produce Eye Tracking Device

Mohammadreza Abolqasmi Dehaqani, professor at the UT Electrical and Computer Engineering, said that detecting and calculating the position of eye and its movement matters a lot in different sciences, including neuroscience, psychology, management, marketing, and design.

"Eye position and pupil size are one of the most important indicators of examining the cognitive performance of humans and other creatures that have the same visual system as humans. Therefore, eye position recording systems are used in different laboratories all over the world,” the UT professor said.

Eye tracking works by following the eye position and movements non-intrusively. A source of invisible near-infrared or infrared light illuminates the pupil. Thus, a reflection generates on the cornea. An infrared camera will then record that reflection, delimit the center of the pupil, deduce eye rotation, and determine gaze direction.

Eye tracking systems measure gaze —the location the observer is looking at on a screen or in the world—through video recording of eye position. A screen eye tracker (SET) uses a specialized eye camera to detect the eye movements of a stationary observer.

“The eye tracking system is a system with various applications that works with an infrared camera and tracks the position of the eye and the size of the pupil with very high spatial and temporal accuracy. The spatial accuracy of the constructed device is about one degree of gaze and the time accuracy is about 500 Hz," Abolqasmi Dehaqani said. 

He pointed to some major advantages of the device they have produced as compared to similar foreign models saying buying it will cost much lower than the imported similar foreign models.

“A similiar Iranian eye tracking system that works with a time accuracy of 500 Hz and an accuracy of one degree of gaze has not been produced yet,” he added.

The executive director of the project to produce the eye movement tracker further said, “This device is the result of the efforts made by electrical and computer engineering students at UT, as all its research, design, construction and simulation stages have been carried out in the brain technology laboratory located in Convergent Technologies Research Center in University of Tehran (NBIC). The device has successfully passed the necessary tests and met the standards to enter the commercialization stage and its commercialization has already begun.”

An example of this device is currently installed at NBIC, where students of electrical and computer engineering faculties, psychology faculty and other researchers use it to conduct their thesis and other researches.

Abolqasmi Dehaqani further pointed out that the eye tracking system can be upgraded, saying, “Another goal of this project is to build an integrated program to meet the diverse needs of users in different fields of science and engineering.”

“The next version of the eye tracker will be applicable on systems such as mobile phones and will have the possibility of developing more research applications in other fields of study such as linguistics, sports sciences and other fields of humanities,” the UT professor concluded.

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