Computer Vision Based Eye Gaze Controlled Virtual Keyboard for People with Quadriplegia

Abstract

Disabilities or physical impairments caused by genetic or traumatic injury hold people from proclaiming their basic needs, feelings, or ideas. This paper presents an eye gaze controlled virtual keyboard which is an assistive system for disable and able-bodied people. Disability such as quadriplegia restrain people from using their four limbs, virtual keyboards proposed in this paper can be used for expressing their thoughts. The proposed virtual keyboard has 40 keys including the delete key, English fonts, numerical digits, and several Latin symbols where each key lights up sequentially in the forward or backward direction. The user’s eye gaze navigates the activation of the key and eye blinking is used for typing the active key. The proposed keyboard has salient features such as sound is played when a key has been pressed and delete key eliminates unintentionally typed letters. The Character Per Minute (CPM), Word Per Minute (WPM), total error rate have been calculated from the tests conducted by several users which show an improved result than the existing models. The proposed virtual keyboard is a low-cost assistive system as it requires only a webcam for performing.