Recognition of Eye-Written Characters Using Deep Neural Network

Abstract

Eye writing is a human–computer interaction tool that translates eye movements into characters using automatic recognition by computers. Eye-written characters are similar in form to handwritten ones, but their shapes are often distorted because of the biosignal’s instability or user mistakes. Various conventional methods have been used to overcome these limitations and recognize eye-written characters accurately, but difficulties have been reported as regards decreasing the error rates. This paper proposes a method using a deep neural network with inception modules and an ensemble structure. Preprocessing procedures, which are often used in conventional methods, were minimized using the proposed method. The proposed method was validated in a writer-independent manner using an open dataset of characters eye-written by 18 writers. The method achieved a 97.78% accuracy, and the error rates were reduced by almost a half compared to those of conventional methods, which indicates that the proposed model successfully learned eye-written characters. Remarkably, the accuracy was achieved in a writer-independent manner, which suggests that a deep neural network model trained using the proposed method is would be stable even for new writers.

Keywords

• artificial neural network
• biosignal analysis
• electrooculogram
• eye-tracking
• human–computer interface
• pattern recognition