# GazeGuide: An Eye-Gaze-Guided Active Immersive UAV Camera
## 1 Introduction  
The eyes are a rich source of information for grouping contexts in our everyday lives. Gaze has served throughout history as a mode of interaction and communication among people [1]. It has been postulated as the best proxy for attention or intention [2]. Nowadays, eye tracking has matured and become an important research topic in computer vision and pattern recognition, because human gaze positions and movements are essential information for many applications ranging from diagnostic to interactive ones [3; 4; 5; 6]. Eye tracking equipment, either worn on the body (head-mounted) [7] or strategically located in the environment [8], is a key requirement of gaze-based applications. In contrast, recent advances in the applications of head-mounted displays (HMDs) for virtual reality have driven the development of HMD-integrated eye-tracking technology. These displays are becoming widely accessible and affordable. The increased accuracy of eye-tracking equipment has made the use of this technology for explicit control tasks with robots feasible [9].  
The research on human-robot interaction (HRI) strives to ensure easy and intuitive interactions between people and robots. Such interactions need natural communication [10]. For human-human interactions, verbal communication is usually the primary factor; at the same time, non-verbal behaviors such as eye-gaze and gestures can convey the person's mental state, augment verbal communication, and portray what is being expressed [11; 12] by humans for interaction with robots. In particular, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) a flying robot that can move freely through the air have a long history in military applications. They are capable of carrying payloads over longdistances while being teleoperated remotely. Teleoperation remains a hot topic in HRI [13], enabling an operator to control a robot remotely in a hazardous inaccessible place. It has been widely used in a variety of applications ranging from space exploration, inspection, robotic navigation, and underwater operations. Many researchers in the field of robotics are interested in remotely controllable agents rather than fully autonomous agents [14].  
Typically, in surveillance and monitoring applications, UAVs are equipped with some specific sensors such as light detection and ranging (LiDAR) [15; 16; 17], and video cameras [18]. They keep monitoring the ground targets of interest (Tols), such as humans, buildings, pipelines, roads, vehicles, and animals, for the purposes of surveillance, monitoring, security, etc. [18]. In such and many other remotely controlled applications, the operator's basic perceptual link is to continuously monitor the status of the robot [19] visually. As the eyes of the operator are engaged in the monitoring task, the main motivation for our research was to explore the use of gaze to control a UAV-mounted camera effortlessly. An effortless control of a UAV's camera is a novel research topic on fusing human input and output modalities.  
This paper presents a novel framework to control a UAV camera maneuvering through eye-gaze as an alternative and sole input modality. Thus, spatial awareness is directly fed without being mediated through remote control. The rest of this paper is organized as follows: In Section 2, related works are discussed. Section 3 discusses the proposed immersive eye-gaze-guided camera (GazeGuide) and its implementation. Section 4 presents a user study followed by the results, conclusion, and future work directions.