Project54 hosted Shaun Cotter of Seeing Machines, who demonstrated the Seeing Machines eye tracker called faceLAB. The eye tracker consists of two cameras, a laptop running image processing software, and an IR illuminator. You can see the entire setup in this picture:

The two cameras are sitting on the laptop, and between them you can see IR diodes which are used to illuminate the subject’s face. The screen displays some of the results of the real-time processing, such as gaze direction, PERCLOS measure, etc, as well as the two camera views of the subject. The subject is Nemanja Memarovic, Project54 graduate student, who tested the system wearing glasses. As we found out glasses do not cause faceLAB any problems, unless they are quite thick.

One way to use the eye tracker is to install it in a driving simulator (e.g. the Project54 driving sim) and track where drivers look during different parts of driving scenarios. This way, one can find out if a distraction in the car (e.g. pushing buttons on an in-car device) reduces the amount of visual scanning the driver does. faceLAB allows creating a 3D model of the world around the driver, and can detect when the driver is looking at a specific part of this world model. This can even be done in real time and thus used to trigger events in the simulator. E.g. one can include the in-car navigation system’s screen in the 3D model and then detect when the driver is looking at it. The driving simulator scenario could then be set up such that when the driver looks at the navigation system’s screen a leading vehicle brakes.

The faceLAB demo was very interesting and over ten Project54 faculty, staff and students got a chance to play with the technology. Here’s another picture from the demo (Oskar Palinko, Project54 graduate student is asking Shaun a question):

I think that all who attended the demo were very impressed. Thanks Shaun! 

Andrew Kun

Subscribe to the comments through RSS Feed