skip to main content


Title: Neural 3D Gaze: 3D Pupil Localization and Gaze Tracking based on Anatomical Eye Model and Neural Refraction Correction
Eye tracking has already made its way to current commercial wearable display devices, and is becoming increasingly important for virtual and augmented reality applications. However, the existing model-based eye tracking solutions are not capable of conducting very accurate gaze angle measurements, and may not be sufficient to solve challenging display problems such as pupil steering or eyebox expansion. In this paper, we argue that accurate detection and localization of pupil in 3D space is a necessary intermediate step in model-based eye tracking. Existing methods and datasets either ignore evaluating the accuracy of 3D pupil localization or evaluate it only on synthetic data. To this end, we capture the first 3D pupilgaze-measurement dataset using a high precision setup with head stabilization and release it as the first benchmark dataset to evaluate both 3D pupil localization and gaze tracking methods. Furthermore, we utilize an advanced eye model to replace the commonly used oversimplified eye model. Leveraging the eye model, we propose a novel 3D pupil localization method with a deep learning-based corneal refraction correction. We demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art works by reducing the 3D pupil localization error by 47.5% and the gaze estimation error by 18.7%. Our dataset and codes can be found here: link.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2107454
NSF-PAR ID:
10389246
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proccedings of the 2022 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR)
Page Range / eLocation ID:
375 to 383
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. null (Ed.)
    We present a personalized, comprehensive eye-tracking solution based on tracking higher-order Purkinje images, suited explicitly for eyeglasses-style AR and VR displays. Existing eye-tracking systems for near-eye applications are typically designed to work for an on-axis configuration and rely on pupil center and corneal reflections (PCCR) to estimate gaze with an accuracy of only about 0.5°to 1°. These are often expensive, bulky in form factor, and fail to estimate monocular accommodation, which is crucial for focus adjustment within the AR glasses. Our system independently measures the binocular vergence and monocular accommodation using higher-order Purkinje reflections from the eye, extending the PCCR based methods. We demonstrate that these reflections are sensitive to both gaze rotation and lens accommodation and model the Purkinje images’ behavior in simulation. We also design and fabricate a user-customized eye tracker using cheap off-the-shelf cameras and LEDs. We use an end-to-end convolutional neural network (CNN) for calibrating the eye tracker for the individual user, allowing for robust and simultaneous estimation of vergence and accommodation. Experimental results show that our solution, specifically catering to individual users, outperforms state-of-the-art methods for vergence and depth estimation, achieving an accuracy of 0.3782°and 1.108 cm respectively. 
    more » « less
  2. null ; null ; null ; null ; null ; null ; null ; null (Ed.)
    Effective assisted living environments must be able to perform inferences on how their occupants interact with their environment. Gaze direction provides strong indications of how people interact with their surroundings. In this paper, we propose a gaze tracking method that uses a neural network regressor to estimate gazes from keypoints and integrates them over time using a moving average mechanism. Our gaze regression model uses confidence gated units to handle cases of keypoint occlusion and estimate its own prediction uncertainty. Our temporal approach for gaze tracking incorporates these prediction uncertainties as weights in the moving average scheme. Experimental results on a dataset collected in an assisted living facility demonstrate that our gaze regression network performs on par with a complex, dataset-specific baseline, while its uncertainty predictions are highly correlated with the actual angular error of corresponding estimations. Finally, experiments on videos sequences show that our temporal approach generates more accurate and stable gaze predictions. 
    more » « less
  3. Researchers have been employing psycho-physiological measures to better understand program comprehension, for example simultaneous fMRI and eye tracking to validate top-down comprehension models. In this paper, we argue that there is additional value in eye-tracking data beyond eye gaze: Pupil dilation and blink rates may offer insights into programmers' cognitive load. However, the fMRI environment may influence pupil dilation and blink rates, which would diminish their informative value. We conducted a preliminary analysis of pupil dilation and blink rates of an fMRI experiment with 22 student participants. We conclude from our preliminary analysis that the correction for our fMRI environment is challenging, but possible, such that we can use pupil dilation and blink rates to more reliably observe program comprehension. 
    more » « less
  4. Virtual Reality (VR) headsets with embedded eye trackers are appearing as consumer devices (e.g. HTC Vive Eye, FOVE). These devices could be used in VR-based education (e.g., a virtual lab, a virtual field trip) in which a live teacher guides a group of students. The eye tracking could enable better insights into students’ activities and behavior patterns. For real-time insight, a teacher’s VR environment can display student eye gaze. These visualizations would help identify students who are confused/distracted, and the teacher could better guide them to focus on important objects. We present six gaze visualization techniques for a VR-embedded teacher’s view, and we present a user study to compare these techniques. The results suggest that a short particle trail representing eye trajectory is promising. In contrast, 3D heatmaps (an adaptation of traditional 2D heatmaps) for visualizing gaze over a short time span are problematic. 
    more » « less
  5. Emerging Virtual Reality (VR) displays with embedded eye trackers are currently becoming a commodity hardware (e.g., HTC Vive Pro Eye). Eye-tracking data can be utilized for several purposes, including gaze monitoring, privacy protection, and user authentication/identification. Identifying users is an integral part of many applications due to security and privacy concerns. In this paper, we explore methods and eye-tracking features that can be used to identify users. Prior VR researchers explored machine learning on motion-based data (such as body motion, head tracking, eye tracking, and hand tracking data) to identify users. Such systems usually require an explicit VR task and many features to train the machine learning model for user identification. We propose a system to identify users utilizing minimal eye-gaze-based features without designing any identification-specific tasks. We collected gaze data from an educational VR application and tested our system with two machine learning (ML) models, random forest (RF) and k-nearest-neighbors (kNN), and two deep learning (DL) models: convolutional neural networks (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM). Our results show that ML and DL models could identify users with over 98% accuracy with only six simple eye-gaze features. We discuss our results, their implications on security and privacy, and the limitations of our work. 
    more » « less