Eye tracking for wearable systems demands low latency and milliwatt-level power, but conventional frame-based pipelines struggle with motion blur, high compute cost, and limited temporal resolution. Such capabilities are vital for enabling seamless and responsive interaction in emerging technologies like augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), where understanding user gaze is key to immersion and interface design. Neuromorphic sensors and spiking neural networks (SNNs) offer a promising alternative, yet existing SNN approaches are either too specialized or fall short of the performance of modern ANN architectures. This paper presents a neuromorphic version of top-performing event-based eye-tracking models, replacing their recurrent and attention modules with lightweight LIF layers and exploiting depth-wise separable convolutions to reduce model complexity. Our models obtain 3.7-4.1px mean error, approaching the accuracy of the application-specific neuromorphic system, Retina (3.24px), while reducing model size by 20x and theoretical compute by 850x, compared to the closest ANN variant of the proposed model. These efficient variants are projected to operate at an estimated 3.9-4.9 mW with 3 ms latency at 1 kHz. The present results indicate that high-performing event-based eye-tracking architectures can be redesigned as SNNs with substantial efficiency gains, while retaining accuracy suitable for real-time wearable deployment.
This paper describes a feature extraction and gaze estimation software, named \textit{Pistol} that can be used with Pupil Invisible projects and other eye trackers in the future. In offline mode, our software extracts multiple features from the eye including, the pupil and iris ellipse, eye aperture, pupil vector, iris vector, eye movement types from pupil and iris velocities, marker detection, marker distance, 2D gaze estimation for the pupil center, iris center, pupil vector, and iris vector using Levenberg Marquart fitting and neural networks. The gaze signal is computed in 2D for each eye …
Video-based eye tracking is a valuable technique in various research fields. Numerous open-source eye tracking algorithms have been developed in recent years, primarily designed for general application with many different camera types. These algorithms do not, however, capitalize on the high frame rate of eye tracking cameras often employed in psychophysical studies. We present a pupil detection method that utilizes this high-speed property to obtain reliable predictions through recursive estimation about certain pupil characteristics in successive camera frames. These predictions are subseque…
Three different algorithms used for eye pupil location were described and tested. Algorithm efficiency comparison was based on human faces images taken from the BioID database. Moreover all the eye localisation methods were implemented in a dedicated application supporting eye movement based computer control. In this case human face images were acquired by a webcam and processed in a real-time.
We present software to detect noise in eye position signals from video-based eye-tracking systems that depend on accurate pupil and corneal reflection position estimation. When such systems transiently fail to properly detect the pupil or the corneal reflection due to occlusion from eyelids, eye lashes or various shadows, the estimated gaze position is false. This produces an artifactual signal in the position trace that is rapidly, irregularly oscillating between true and false gaze positions. We refer to this noise as RIONEPS (Rapid Irregularly Oscillating Noise of the Eye Position Signal). …
Real-time, accurate, and robust pupil detection is an essential prerequisite to enable pervasive eye-tracking and its applications -- e.g., gaze-based human computer interaction, health monitoring, foveated rendering, and advanced driver assistance. However, automated pupil detection has proved to be an intricate task in real-world scenarios due to a large mixture of challenges such as quickly changing illumination and occlusions. In this paper, we introduce the Pupil Reconstructor PuRe, a method for pupil detection in pervasive scenarios based on a novel edge segment selection and conditional…
Pupil Labs UG（Pupil Labs公司）；Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）
Commercial head-mounted eye trackers provide useful features to customers in industry and research but are expensive and rely on closed source hardware and software. This limits the application areas and use of mobile eye tracking to expert users and inhibits user-driven development, customisation, and extension. In this paper we present Pupil -- an accessible, affordable, and extensible open source platform for mobile eye tracking and gaze-based interaction. Pupil comprises 1) a light-weight headset with high-resolution cameras, 2) an open source software framework for mobile eye tracking, as…
University at Albany, State University of New York（纽约州立大学奥尔巴尼分校）；University at Buffalo, State University of New York（纽约州立大学布法罗分校）；Keya Medical（科亚医疗）
Generative adversary network (GAN) generated high-realistic human faces have been used as profile images for fake social media accounts and are visually challenging to discern from real ones. In this work, we show that GAN-generated faces can be exposed via irregular pupil shapes. This phenomenon is caused by the lack of physiological constraints in the GAN models. We demonstrate that such artifacts exist widely in high-quality GAN-generated faces and further describe an automatic method to extract the pupils from two eyes and analysis their shapes for exposing the GAN-generated faces. Qualita…
University of Tübingen（图宾根大学）；SCHUFA Holding AG（SCHUFA控股股份公司）
Real-time, accurate, and robust pupil detection is an essential prerequisite for pervasive video-based eye-tracking. However, automated pupil detection in real-world scenarios has proven to be an intricate challenge due to fast illumination changes, pupil occlusion, non centered and off-axis eye recording, and physiological eye characteristics. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a method based on a novel dual convolutional neural network pipeline. In its first stage the pipeline performs coarse pupil position identification using a convolutional neural network and subregions from a downsca…
Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）
We present labelled pupils in the wild (LPW), a novel dataset of 66 high-quality, high-speed eye region videos for the development and evaluation of pupil detection algorithms. The videos in our dataset were recorded from 22 participants in everyday locations at about 95 FPS using a state-of-the-art dark-pupil head-mounted eye tracker. They cover people with different ethnicities, a diverse set of everyday indoor and outdoor illumination environments, as well as natural gaze direction distributions. The dataset also includes participants wearing glasses, contact lenses, as well as make-up. We …
College of Electronics and Information Engineering, Sichuan University, Chengdu 610065, China（电子信息工程学院，四川大学，成都610065，中国）；Thrust of Microelectronics of Function Hub, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Guangzhou 511400, China（功能枢纽微电子研究所，香港科技大学（广州），广州511400，中国）
Head-mounted eye trackers promise convenient access to reliable gaze data in unconstrained environments. Due to several limitations, however, often they can only partially deliver on this promise. Among those are the following: (i) the necessity of performing a device setup and calibration prior to every use of the eye tracker, (ii) a lack of robustness of gaze-estimation results against perturbations, such as outdoor lighting conditions and unavoidable slippage of the eye tracker on the head of the subject, and (iii) behavioral distortion resulting from social awkwardness, due to the unnatura…
Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg（马格德堡奥托·冯·格里克大学）
There is a widespread assumption that the peak velocities of visually guided saccades in the dark are up to 10~\% slower than those made in the light. Studies that questioned the impact of the surrounding brightness conditions, come to differing conclusions, whether they have an influence or not and if so, in which manner. The problem is of a complex nature as the illumination condition itself may not contribute to different measured peak velocities solely but in combination with the estimation of the pupil size due to its deformation during saccades or different gaze positions. Even the measu…
Fast and robust pupil detection is an essential prerequisite for video-based eye-tracking in real-world settings. Several algorithms for image-based pupil detection have been proposed, their applicability is mostly limited to laboratory conditions. In realworld scenarios, automated pupil detection has to face various challenges, such as illumination changes, reflections (on glasses), make-up, non-centered eye recording, and physiological eye characteristics. We propose ElSe, a novel algorithm based on ellipse evaluation of a filtered edge image. We aim at a robust, resource-saving approach tha…
Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）
3D gaze information is important for scene-centric attention analysis but accurate estimation and analysis of 3D gaze in real-world environments remains challenging. We present a novel 3D gaze estimation method for monocular head-mounted eye trackers. In contrast to previous work, our method does not aim to infer 3D eyeball poses but directly maps 2D pupil positions to 3D gaze directions in scene camera coordinate space. We first provide a detailed discussion of the 3D gaze estimation task and summarize different methods, including our own. We then evaluate the performance of different 3D gaze…
Eberhard Karls University Tübingen（蒂宾根大学）；SCHUFA Holding AG（SCHUFA控股股份公司）
Real-time, accurate, and robust pupil detection is an essential prerequisite for pervasive video-based eye-tracking. However, automated pupil detection in realworld scenarios has proven to be an intricate challenge due to fast illumination changes, pupil occlusion, non-centered and off-axis eye recording, as well as physiological eye characteristics. In this paper, we approach this challenge through: I) a convolutional neural network (CNN) running in real time on a single core, II) a novel computational intensive two stage CNN for accuracy improvement, and III) a fast propability distribution …
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Emory University（埃默里大学）
In this paper, we introduce a portable eye imaging device denoted as lab-on-a-headset, which can automatically perform a swinging flashlight test. We utilized this device in a clinical study to obtain high-resolution recordings of eyes while they are exposed to a varying light stimuli. Half of the participants had relative afferent pupillary defect (RAPD) while the other half was a control group. In case of positive RAPD, patients pupils constrict less or do not constrict when light stimuli swings from the unaffected eye to the affected eye. To automatically diagnose RAPD, we propose an algori…
TEyeD: Over 20 million real-world eye images with Pupil, Eyelid, and Iris 2D and 3D Segmentations, 2D and 3D Landmarks, 3D Eyeball, Gaze Vector, and Eye Movement Types
In this paper, we present a new feature that can be used to classify cognitive load based on pupil information. The feature consists of a temporal segmentation of the eye tracking recordings. For each segment of the temporal partition, a probability distribution of pupil size is computed and stored. These probability distributions can then be used to classify the cognitive load. The presented feature significantly improves the classification accuracy of the cognitive load compared to other statistical values obtained from eye tracking data, which represent the state of the art in this field. T…
AmbientEye: A Dataset for Pupil Segmentation under Natural Ambient Infrared Illumination
Electrical Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology（电子工程系，韩国科学技术院）；Intelligent Systems Department, Delft University of Technology（智能系统系，代尔夫特理工大学）
In this paper we present a new approach for pupil segmentation. It can be computed and trained very efficiently, making it ideal for online use for high speed eye trackers as well as for energy saving pupil detection in mobile eye tracking. The approach is inspired by the BORE and CBF algorithms and generalizes the binary comparison by Haar features. Since these features are intrinsically very susceptible to noise and fluctuating light conditions, we combine them with conditional pupil shape probabilities. In addition, we also rank each feature according to its importance in determining the pu…
Video-based glint-free eye tracking commonly estimates gaze direction based on the pupil center. The boundary of the pupil is fitted with an ellipse and the euclidean center of the ellipse in the image is taken as the center of the pupil. However, the center of the pupil is generally not mapped to the center of the ellipse by the projective camera transformation. This error resulting from using a point that is not the true center of the pupil directly affects eye tracking accuracy. We investigate the underlying geometric problem of determining the center of a circular object based on its proje…
Ellipse fitting, an essential component in pupil or iris tracking based video oculography, is performed on previously segmented eye parts generated using various computer vision techniques. Several factors, such as occlusions due to eyelid shape, camera position or eyelashes, frequently break ellipse fitting algorithms that rely on well-defined pupil or iris edge segments. In this work, we propose training a convolutional neural network to directly segment entire elliptical structures and demonstrate that such a framework is robust to occlusions and offers superior pupil and iris tracking perf…
University of Science and Technology Beijing（北京科技大学）
User's mental state is concerned gradually, during the interaction course of human robot. As the measurement and identification method of psychological state, tension, has certain practical significance role. At presents there is no suitable method of measuring the tension. Firstly, sum up some availability of eye movement index. And then parameters extraction on eye movement characteristics of normal illumination is studied, including the location of the face, eyes location, access to the pupil diameter, the eye pupil center characteristic parameters. And with the judgment of the tension in e…
Eye tracking spreads through a vast area of applications from ophthalmology, assistive technologies to gaming and virtual reality. Precisely detecting the pupil's contour and center is the very first step in many of these tasks, hence needs to be performed accurately. Although detection of pupil is a simple problem when it is entirely visible; occlusions and oblique view angles complicate the solution. In this study, we propose APPD, an adaptive and precise pupil boundary detection method that is able to infer whether entire pupil is in clearly visible by a heuristic that estimates the shape o…
Wearable pupil detection systems often separate the analysis of the captured wearer's eye images for wirelessly-tethered back-end systems. We argue in this paper that investigating hardware-software co-designs would bring along opportunities to make such systems smaller and more efficient. We introduce an open-source embedded system for wearable, non-invasive pupil detection in real-time, on the wearable, embedded platform itself. Our system consists of a head-mounted eye tracker prototype, which combines two miniature camera systems with Raspberry Pi-based embedded system. Apart from the hard…
A new high-precision eye-tracking method has been demonstrated recently by tracking the motion of iris features rather than by exploiting pupil edges. While the method provides high precision, it suffers from temporal drift, an inability to track across blinks, and loss of texture matches in the presence of motion blur. In this work, we present a new methodology $pi_t$ to address these issues by optimally combining the information from both iris textures and pupil edges. With this method, we show an improvement in precision (S2S-RMS & STD) of at least 48% and 10% respectively while fixating a …
Algorithms for accurate localization of pupil centre is essential for gaze tracking in real world conditions. Most of the algorithms fail in real world conditions like illumination variations, contact lenses, glasses, eye makeup, motion blur, noise, etc. We propose a new algorithm which improves the detection rate in real world conditions. The proposed algorithm uses both edges as well as intensity information along with a candidate filtering approach to identify the best pupil candidate. A simple tracking scheme has also been added which improves the processing speed. The algorithm has been e…
EG-SpikeFormer: Eye-Gaze Guided Transformer on Spiking Neural Networks for Medical Image Analysis
School of Computing, University of Georgia（佐治亚大学计算学院）；University of Texas at Arlington（德克萨斯大学阿灵顿分校）；Massachusetts General Hospital（麻省总医院）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）；University of Georgia（佐治亚大学）；Department of Physics and Astronomy（物理与天文学系）
Eye-based information channels include the pupils, gaze, saccades, fixational movements, and numerous forms of eye opening and closure. Pupil size variation indicates cognitive load and emotion, while a person's gaze direction is said to be congruent with the motivation to approach or avoid stimuli. The eyelids are involved in facial expressions that can encode basic emotions. Additionally, eye-based cues can have implications for human annotators of emotions or feelings. Despite these facts, the use of eye-based cues in affective computing is in its infancy, however, and this work is intended…
National Center for Scientific Research "Demokritos"（国家科学研究中心“德谟克利特”）
Unobtrusive every day health monitoring can be of important use for the elderly population. In particular, pupil size may be a valuable source of information, since, apart from pathological cases, it can reveal the emotional state, the fatigue and the ageing. To allow for unobtrusive monitoring to gain acceptance, one should seek for efficient methods of monitoring using com- mon low-cost hardware. This paper describes a method for monitoring pupil sizes using a common web camera in real time. Our method works by first detecting the face and the eyes area. Subsequently, optimal iris and sclera…
FACET: Fast and Accurate Event-Based Eye Tracking Using Ellipse Modeling for Extended Reality
School of Automation Science and Electrical Engineering, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学自动化科学与电气工程学院）；DVSense (Beijing) Technology Co., Ltd.（北京感观科技有限公司）；Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）；Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), Leiden University（莱顿大学莱顿高级计算机科学研究所）
Riverside Research（里弗赛德研究所）；Indian Institute of Science（印度科学学院）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）
The ability to attend to salient regions of a visual scene is an innate and necessary preprocessing step for both biological and engineered systems performing high-level visual tasks (e.g. object detection, tracking, and classification). Computational efficiency, in regard to processing bandwidth and speed, is improved by only devoting computational resources to salient regions of the visual stimuli. In this paper, we first present a neuromorphic, bottom-up, dynamic visual saliency model based on the notion of proto-objects. This is achieved by incorporating the temporal characteristics of the…
We built a custom video-based eye-tracker that saves every video frame as a full resolution image (MJPEG). Images can be processed offline for the detection of ocular features, including the pupil and corneal reflection (First Purkinje Image, P1) position. A comparison of multiple algorithms for detection of pupil and corneal reflection can be performed. The system provides for highly flexible stimulus creation, with mixing of graphic, image, and video stimuli. We can change cameras and infrared illuminators depending on the image qualities and frame rate desired. Using this system, we have de…
University of California Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；KTH Royal Institute of Technology（瑞典皇家理工学院）
The cameras in modern gaze-tracking systems suffer from fundamental bandwidth and power limitations, constraining data acquisition speed to 300 Hz realistically. This obstructs the use of mobile eye trackers to perform, e.g., low latency predictive rendering, or to study quick and subtle eye motions like microsaccades using head-mounted devices in the wild. Here, we propose a hybrid frame-event-based near-eye gaze tracking system offering update rates beyond 10,000 Hz with an accuracy that matches that of high-end desktop-mounted commercial trackers when evaluated in the same conditions. Our s…
3ET: Efficient Event-based Eye Tracking using a Change-Based ConvLSTM Network
Institute of Neuroinformatics, University of Zurich and ETH Zurich（苏黎世大学和苏黎世联邦理工学院神经信息学研究所）；Department of Microelectronics, Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学微电子系）
Universidad de Oriente（东方大学）；École Polytechnique de Montréal（蒙特利尔理工学院）
In the last decade, the development of technologies and tools for eye tracking has been a constantly growing area. Detecting the center of the pupil, using image processing techniques, has been an essential step in this process. A large number of techniques have been proposed for pupil center detection using both traditional image processing and machine learning-based methods. Despite the large number of methods proposed, no comparative work on their performance was found, using the same images and performance metrics. In this work, we aim at comparing four of the most frequently cited traditi…
Khalifa University Center for Autonomous Robotic Systems (KUCARS), Khalifa University of Science and Technology（哈利法大学自主机器人系统中心（KUCARS），哈利法科技大学）；Kingston University（金斯顿大学）；Purdue University（普渡大学）
Robotic vision plays a major role in factory automation to service robot applications. However, the traditional use of frame-based camera sets a limitation on continuous visual feedback due to their low sampling rate and redundant data in real-time image processing, especially in the case of high-speed tasks. Event cameras give human-like vision capabilities such as observing the dynamic changes asynchronously at a high temporal resolution ($1μs$) with low latency and wide dynamic range. In this paper, we present a visual servoing method using an event camera and a switching control strategy t…
College of Technology, Vietnam National University（越南国立大学技术学院）
Tracking the movement of human eyes is expected to yield natural and convenient applications based on human-computer interaction (HCI). To implement an effective eye-tracking system, eye movements must be recorded without placing any restriction on the user's behavior or user discomfort. This paper describes an eye movement recording system that offers free-head, simple configuration. It does not require the user to wear anything on her head, and she can move her head freely. Instead of using a computer, the system uses a visual digital signal processor (DSP) camera to detect the position of e…
University of Tübingen（图宾根大学）；Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）
Eye tracking is handled as one of the key technologies for applications that assess and evaluate human attention, behavior, and biometrics, especially using gaze, pupillary, and blink behaviors. One of the challenges with regard to the social acceptance of eye tracking technology is however the preserving of sensitive and personal information. To tackle this challenge, we employ a privacy-preserving framework based on randomized encoding to train a Support Vector Regression model using synthetic eye images privately to estimate the human gaze. During the computation, none of the parties learn …
Xperi Corporation（Xperi公司）；National University of Ireland Galway（爱尔兰国立高威大学）；Prophesee（Prophesee公司）
Event cameras contain emerging, neuromorphic vision sensors that capture local light intensity changes at each pixel, generating a stream of asynchronous events. This way of acquiring visual information constitutes a departure from traditional frame based cameras and offers several significant advantages: low energy consumption, high temporal resolution, high dynamic range and low latency. Driver monitoring systems (DMS) are in-cabin safety systems designed to sense and understand a drivers physical and cognitive state. Event cameras are particularly suited to DMS due to their inherent advanta…
Human eye gaze detection plays an important role in various fields, including human-computer interaction, virtual reality and cognitive science. Although different relatively accurate systems of eye tracking and gaze detection exist, they are usually either too expensive to be bought for low cost applications or too complex to be implemented easily. In this article, we propose a non-wearable system for eye tracking and gaze detection with low complexity and cost. The proposed system provides a medium accuracy which makes it suitable for general applications in which low cost and easy implement…
