Closed-Eye Gaze Gestures: Detection and Recognition of Closed-Eye Movements with Cameras in Smart Glasses

Gaze gestures bear potential for user input with mobile devices, especially smart glasses, due to being always available and hands-free. So far, gaze gesture recognition approaches have utilized open-eye movements only and disregarded closed-eye movements. This paper is a first investigation of the feasibility of detecting and recognizing closed-eye gaze gestures from close-up optical sources, e.g. eye-facing cameras embedded in smart glasses. We propose four different closed-eye gaze gesture protocols, which extend the alphabet of existing open-eye gaze gesture approaches. We further propose a methodology for detecting and extracting the corresponding closed-eye movements with full optical flow, time series processing, and machine learning. In the evaluation of the four protocols we find closed-eye gaze gestures to be detected 82.8%–91.6% of the time, and extracted gestures to be recognized correctly with an accuracy of 92.9%–99.2%.