Eye Gaze Tracking for Detecting Non-verbal Communication in Meeting Environments

Abstract

Non-verbal communication in a team meeting is important to understand the essence of the conversation. Among other gestures, eye gaze shows the focus of interest on a common workspace and can also be used for an interpersonal synchronisation. If this non-verbal information is missing and or cannot be perceived by blind and visually impaired people (BVIP), they would lack important information to get fully immersed in the meeting and may feel alienated in the course of the discussion. Thus, this paper proposes an automatic system to track where a sighted person is gazing at. We use the open source software 'OpenFace' and develop it as an eye tracker by using a support vector regressor to make it work similarly to commercially available expensive eye trackers. We calibrate OpenFace using a desktop screen with a 2 × 3 box matrix and conduct a user study with 28 users on a big screen (161.7 cm x 99.8 cm x 11.5 cm) with a 1 × 5 box matrix. In this user study, we compare the results of our developed algorithm for OpenFace to an SMI RED 250 eye tracker. The results showed that our work achieved an overall relative accuracy of 58.54%.