Eye gaze tracking based directional control interface for interactive applications Amit Laddi 1 & Neelam Rup Prakash 2 Received: 12 July 2018 /Revised: 8 April 2019 /Accepted: 4 July 2019 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019 Abstract This paper proposes an unobtrusive and calibration-free framework towards eye gaze tracking based interactive directional control interface for desktop environment using simple webcam under unconstrained settings. The proposed eye gaze tracking involved hybrid approach designed by combining two different techniques based upon both supervised and unsupervised methods wherein the unsupervised image gradients method computes the iris centers over the eye regions extracted by the supervised regression based algorithm. Experiments performed by the proposed hybrid approach to detect eye regions along with iris centers over challenging face image datasets exhibited exciting results. Similar approach for eye gaze tracking worked well in real-time by using a simple web camera. Further, PC based interactive directional control interface based upon iris position has been designed that works without needing any prior calibrations unlike other Infrared illumination based eye trackers. The proposed work may be useful to the people with full body motor disabilities, who need interactive and unobtrusive eye gaze control based applications to live independently. Keywords Iris center . Supervised . Unsupervised . Hybrid . Unconstrained environment . Eye gaze . Directional control interface . Interactive applications 1 Introduction The eye gaze of a person is related to the movements and direction of the subject’ s eyes, and such information gathered in real-time is known as eye gaze tracking. Eye gaze trackers are the devices used to detect eye gaze movements and direction through measuring pupil positions. Multimedia Tools and Applications https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-019-07940-3 * Amit Laddi amitcsio@yahoo.com; amitladdi@csio.res.in Neelam Rup Prakash neelamrprakash@pec.ac.in Extended author information available on the last page of the article