Job opening at Duke University: Software developer with research focus

Under the direction of the Chair of the Department of Radiology at Duke University and an international research group, the Software Engineer is responsible for developing and maintaining a research platform used to study visual perception. This research project utilizes eye trackers to capture gaze paths as the Radiologists search through medical image data sets. Your role involves rapid software development; as such you should be comfortable with swiftly assembling software on short iterations without formal requirements. Tasks and Activities: Rapid software development to support research activities without formal requirements. Analyze design and architectural issues, and adjust existing system design and procedures to solve problems in a dynamic environment. Solving a wide range of problems ranging from user interface design to more complex architectural design without supervision. Readily accept responsibility and demonstrate ability to work independently. Responsible for designing, developing, implementing, testing and maintaining software. Regularly communicate project progress, issues, and risks to project manager. Organizing datacollection with human subjects using eye tracking devices and the developed software platform. Qualifications: Required: Strong technical knowledge and experience in the development, implementation and maintenance of an information system. Aptitude to learn and understand change in software development process, procedures and methodologies. Demonstrated experience with scientific methodology, academic writing and basic statistical analysis. 5+ years of software development experience in object-orient programming technologies. 2+ years of experience with Microsoft .Net C# and Windows Presentation Foundation. Detailed technical knowledge and experience in use of data structures and network programming using TCP/IP and UDP. Desired: Experience with eye track systems or other forms of video-based tracking systems. Experience from software engineering in a research setting. Experience with the DICOM Medical Image format and visualization. Experience designing or implementing algorithms for data analysis and image processing. Education MS+ in Computer Science or equivalent Please visit this page to apply for the opening.

LG introduces the world first Glasses-Free 3D monitor with eye-tracking technology

Today LG announced a 20" LCD display with built-in "eye tracking" technology that enables glasses-free 3D imaging which moves this technology closer to the consumer market. The image below does, as far as I can tell, not reveal any infrared illuminators, a requirement for all known systems with high accuracy so it's probably more of a rough estimation system than a full-blown remote system. Best known accuracy (published research) under natural light is about 3-4 degrees of angle, with their financial resources they could potentially achieve better results. 

Left. The "special" eye tracking camera sensor. Looks like a rather typical webcam CMOS sensor to me. Unless they are doing some magic it will not allow accurate gaze estimation. Regardless, makes me wonder if 3D displays is the path by which eye tracking goes mainstream? Is this related to the collaboration between Seeing Machines and SuperD announced earlier this year or just a competing solution? Details are sparse, I'll keep you posted as it becomes available. 

Official press release:


SEOUL, July, 13, 2011 – LG Electronics (LG) today unveiled the world’s first glasses-free monitor utilizing eye-tracking technology to maintain an optimal 3D image from a range of viewing angles. The 20-inch D2000 (Korean model: DX2000) monitor was developed as a fully functional entertainment display capable of reproducing games, movies and images in all their realistic glory.

“With a full line-up of 3D TVs, laptops, projectors and smartphones, LG Electronics is by far and away the industry leader in all things 3D.” said Si-hwan Park, Vice President of the Monitor Division at LG’s Home Entertainment Company. “LG’s position has always been that 3D will and must eventually function without glasses. The D2000 is a look at what the future has in store.”

The D2000’s 3D effect comes courtesy of glasses-free parallax barrier 3D technology, and the application of the world’s first eye-tracking feature to the monitor. The combination of parallax barrier and eye-tracking in a single unit promises to open up new horizons for glasses-free 3D products.

Existing glasses-free 3D technologies generally require viewers to stay within a tightly restricted angle and distance to perceive the 3D images. However, the D2000 has done much to resolve this issue, allowing viewer much freer movement and more comfortable viewing. Eye tracking in the D2000 works via a special camera sensor attached to the monitor which detects changes in the user’s eye position in real-time. With this information, the monitor calculates the angle and position of the viewer and adjusts the displayed image for the optimal 3D effect.

In addition to playing back existing 3D content, the D2000 has a highly refined 2D to 3D conversion feature which adds a new dimension to existing movies and game playing.

The D2000, available in Korea this month, will be introduced in other markets around the world in the latter part of 2011.

This video demonstrates the use of Ergoneers Dikablis Eye-Control Module used to interact with a standard LCD TV. The project was carried out in collaboration with Technical University of Munich and reminds me much of an ongoing research project at ITU Copenhagen.

Gliding and Saccadic Gaze Gesture Recognition in Real Time (Rozado, 2011)

David Rozado with the Department of Neural Computation at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid have developed a neural network approach for detecting gaze gestures in real time. I met David at ITU Copenhagen last summer when he was visiting and discussed this research, I'm happy to see that it came out with such great results. This research was part of Davids Ph.D thesis which focused on Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) neural network which is a bioinspired pattern recognition algorithm. Using a low cost webcam and the ITU Gaze Tracker he is able to recognize ten different gestures with 90% accuracy using raw data. When a fixation detection algorithm and dwell time triggers are employed it is possible to achieve 100% detection rates (at the expense of longer activation times). 

Eyetrax webcam eye tracker from Carnegie Mellon

"Eyetrax is dynamic eye tracking software that uses a simple stationary web camera to detect eye movement. It can be used as a motionless computer interface and is especially useful when working with ALS patients. Additionally, the non-obtrusive nature of the program allows it to work perfectly to discretely generate hotspot maps for marketing purposes". The system is developed by Joseph Fernandez, Skylar Roebuck and Jonathon Smereka and was demonstrated at the Multimedia Computing Demos on May 3rd at Carnegie Mellon.

Utechzone demos

Recently Taiwanese Utechzone demonstrated a little game at Taipei Computex 2011.



Utechzone also demonstrated a driver fatigue detection system which is housed in a smaller formfactor. This system tracks the eye (open/closed) but doesn't perform gaze estimation. The video also shows the underlying gaze tracking system used in their Spring system which appears to have some issues with glasses.


Fast forward to 1 minute in

Mobile gaze-based screen interaction in 3D environments (D. Mardanbeigi, 2011)

Diako Mardanbeigi presents a method that enables the user to interact with any planar digital display in a 3D environment using a head-mounted eye tracker. An effective method for identifying the screens in the field of view of the user is also presented which can be applied in a general scenario in which multiple users can interact with multiple screens. Diakos PhD project at ITU Copenhagen concerns mobile gaze-based interaction. 





Related publication: 

• Diako Mardanbegi and Dan Witzner Hansen. 2011. Mobile gaze-based screen interaction in 3D environments. In Proceedings of the 1st Conference on Novel Gaze-Controlled Applications(NGCA '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, , Article 2 , 4 pages. PDF/Online

Setscan EyeLock - Law enforcement training system

Setscan, a Canadian supplier of training equipment for law enforcement and military have partnered with Arrington Research to develop a binocular headmounted system with associated software called Eye Lock. The system aims at evaluating and optimizing officers allocation of visual attention. Looking at the right thing is obviously important as milliseconds count when guns are drawn. The eye tracking system is the same as those used for any natural-scene perception research but the market adaptation and focus to meet the needs of a specific domain is interesting.

UCSF using eye tracking to detect early stages of neurodegeneration

Sabes Lab at University of California, San Francisco are using high speed eye tracking systems to study eye movements as a tool for detecting neurodegenerative diseases. The data collected including response time, fixation accuracy and saccade velocity. These are important parameters that could identify approaching or existing neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer. This area holds a great market potential and is feasible in a near future as the remote systems are coming closer to meeting the requirements of tracker speed and accuracy.

The EyeHarp: An Eye Tracking Based Musical Instrument

The main goal of the Zacharias Vamvakousis EyeHarp project is to allow people with paralysis resulting from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis to play music using only their eyes. To build this, Zacharias was inspired by the EyeWriter open source initiative: "...a low-cost eye-tracking apparatus & custom software that allows graffiti writers and artists with paralysis resulting from Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis to draw using only their eyes". Zacharias spent only 50 euros to build his eye tracker using a modified version of the Sony PS3 eye camera. The application is implemented in openframeworks v0.6. 


Alternatively, the instrument can be controlled using the mouse pointer (MouseHarp version). Then the free software camera mouse can be used to control the instrument with head movements. Any technology that can take control of the mouse pointer can be used in order to control the instrument. That way the mouseHarp could be an appropriate instrument for many cases of people with physical disabilities. The mouseHarp version is completely independent from the eyeWriter project. Combining the mouseHarp source with the source of the eyeWriter project, we get the eyeHarp! A low-cost gaze controlled musical instrument! Both versions are free and open source.

The EyeHarp project is part of Zacharias master thesis in Sound And Music Computing in UPF, Barcelona. His supervisor is Rafael Ramirez.

A paper on the application has been published:

• Vamvakousis Z., Ramirez R. (2011) The Eyeharp: Aa Eye-Tracking-based Musical Instrument. SMC Conference 2011, Padova, Italy (PDF)