Abstract

Various hands-free mouse replacement systems have been developed for people having a disability in movement and many improvements have been witnessed during the past three decades. For those with disabilities in the movement who have not yet had a fair chance to use the typical input devices of a personal computer, many authors have put forth replacements for the mouse during the past three decades. The overhead of employing head-mounted devices is decreased in camera-based systems by using the web camera as the mouse. The research problems and opportunities are tracking the user’s facial expression of various users with various head poses through the camera and accurately converting into mouse cursor movement and click events. The user’s inadvertent head movements cause the present systems to lose the tracked feature, and they are only capable of moving the pointer in a slanting direction. The suggested system employs fuzzy logic in its decision-making to streamline and enhance the effectiveness of managing the cursor and its interactions on Graphical User Interfaces, allowing persons with disabilities to move about and utilise computers with ease. By mapping the mouse cursor movement exclusively with the deliberate head movement and disregarding the natural head motions, the system addresses the issue of feature loss. The technology also accomplishes the cursor’s horizontal and vertical movement. The usual GUI interactive features like menus and scroll bars that need horizontal or vertical movement are difficult to operate on the existing systems since they can only move the cursor in a slanting manner. Unintentional head movements by users frequently result in the current system losing track of facial feature tracking. The suggested method uses a standard web camera to capture the three-dimensional head rotation. To shift the mouse pointer vertically, the positions of the nasal bridge and nose tip are collected. The inner corners of the left and right eyes, as well as the tip of the nose, are also used to shift the mouse cursor horizontally. Unintentional head motions are disregarded to prevent the loss of face features, and by using fuzzy logic, the movement of the mouse pointer is only mapped with the intended head movements. The fuzzy control uses the head’s rate, direction, and distance as inputs to determine how the mouse pointer will travel. By capturing the stable, purposeful, and sudden movements of the head, respectively, the fuzzy system classifies the movement of the head as weak, fair, or powerful. By removing the weak and strong head motions, the algorithm just maps the fair head movements with cursor movement on the screen. The proposed system has achieved the horizontal and vertical movement of the cursor and the results are significant when compared with the existing system. The system also successfully ignores the slight movement of the head captured by the web camera when the user remains the head stable, and the feature loss is completely avoided. The performance metric used here is the accuracy of mouse clicks to evaluate the model.

Keywords: assistive technology; hands-free computing; alternative mouse; camera mouse; face recognition; 3D head movement; disabled users.