Coarse Eyeball Direction Recognition from Eyelid Skin Deformation Using Infrared Distance Sensors on Eyewear

As smart eyewear becomes increasingly widespread, the need for hands-free input interfaces is growing. Although eye-based input is a promising approach, many everyday interactions do not necessarily require the high-precision gaze-point estimation used in mainstream camera-based systems; instead, what is often needed is the recognition of coarse eyeball direction. In this study, we propose a method for recognizing coarse eyeball direction using infrared distance sensors mounted on eyewear. The proposed method leverages deformation patterns in the eyelid and surrounding skin associated with changes in eyeball direction. The evaluation results show that the proposed method achieved macro-F1 scores of 0.9 or higher in the best-performing conditions for the five- and nine-direction settings. These results demonstrate the feasibility of recognizing coarse eyeball direction from eyelid-skin deformation using infrared distance sensors on eyewear. Rather than replacing high-precision gaze-point estimation, the proposed method can be positioned as a low-cost, non-contact, and low-dimensional sensing approach for command-type eye-based input on eyewear devices.