AMESMC: Automated Measurement of Eye-movements and Strabismus with Minimal Calibration

AMESMC

This project focuses on the development of an advanced eye-tracker with a large measurement range and minimal calibration, especially for young children and people with mental disabilities. Current systems require complex calibrations and cannot measure angles greater than 30°, which limits research on strabismus and traffic viewing behavior. The new eye-tracker will be validated by comparing measurements in healthy subjects with existing systems. In addition, strabismus measurements will be assessed by comparing them with those of orthoptists to test accuracy.

Researcher

Arthur Pijpaert

Position

PhD Student

Financing

TKI-LSH

Period

2021-2025

Promotieonderzoek

Automated Measurement of Eye-movements and Strabismus with Minimal Calibration (AMESMC)

Why are we studying this?

Currently it is hard to perform eye-tracking studies with young children and mentally impaired people. This is due to the extensive 9-point calibration procedure prior to an eye-tracking measurement. For young children and mentally impaired, it is very difficult or even impossible to ask them to perform a 9-point calibration; which also makes it very hard to do eye-tracking studies with current available technologies. Besides the calibration procedure, the head should remain relatively motionless to the system, which is also difficult for the target audience.

With most eye-trackers, it is currently hard to measure gaze-angles higher than 30°. For this reason these techniques cannot be used for measuring strabismus angles and to analyse viewing behaviour in traffic.

What is our goal?

The goal of the project is the development of an eye-tracker with a high measurement range that needs minimal calibration. The project also has the following sub-goals:

  1. Development of an automated software system for measuring strabismus angles;
  2. Make eye-tracking research possible on young children and mentally impaired;
  3. Development of a system for measuring viewing behaviour in traffic.

How do we perform this study?

The eye-tracker is developed in collaboration with Lamérs. Validation of the developed eye-tracking system is done by gathering gaze information on healthy patients and to compare this data with gaze data of a well-established eye-tracker. This will provide us with information about the accuracy and precision in measuring the gaze by our eye-tracker.

For the validation of the strabismus angle, tests will be performed on patients with strabismus. The results of the system will be compared to the strabismus angles determined by multiple orthoptists. This will give us more insight on the accuracy for determining strabismus angles using our system.

Promotors
Prof. Dr. Ruth van Nispen, Dr. René van Rijn