Modelling of blink-related eyelid-induced shunting on the electrooculogram

Abstract

Besides the traditional regression model-based techniques to estimate the gaze angles (GAs) from electrooculography (EOG) signals, more recent works have investigated the use of a battery model for GA estimation. This is a white-box, explicit and physically-driven model which relates the monopolar EOG potential to the electrode-cornea and electrode-retina distances. In this work, this model is augmented to cater for the blink-induced EOG signal characteristics, by modelling the eyelid-induced shunting effect during blinks. Specifically, a channel-dependent parameter representing the extent to which the amount of eyelid opening affects the particular EOG channel is introduced. A method to estimate these parameters is also proposed and the proposed model is validated by incorporating it in a Kalman filter to estimate the eyelid opening during blinks. The results obtained have demonstrated that the proposed model can accurately represent the blink-related eyelid-induced shunting.