An Eye-Tracker-Based 3D Point-of-Gaze Estimation Method Using Head Movement

Abstract

Eye trackers are currently used to sense the positions of both the centers of the pupils and the point-of-gaze (POG) position on a screen, in keeping with the original objective for which they were designed; however, it remains difficult to measure the positions of three-dimensional (3D) POGs. This paper proposes a method for 3D gaze estimation by using head movement, pupil position data, and POGs on a screen. The method assumes that a person, usually unintentionally, moves his or her head a short distance such that multiple straight lines can be drawn from the center point between the two pupils to the POG. When the person is continuously focusing on a given 3D POG while moving, these lines represent the lines of sight that intersect at a 3D POG . That 3D POG can, therefore, be found from the intersection of several lines of sight formed by head movements. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, experimental equipment was constructed, and experiments with five male and five female participants were performed in which the participants looked at nine test points in a 3D space for approximately 20 s each. The experimental results reveal that the proposed method can measure 3D POGs with average distance errors of 13.36 cm, 7.58 cm, 5.72 cm, 3.97 cm, and 3.52 cm for head movement distances of 1 cm, 2 cm, 3 cm, 4 cm, and 5 cm, respectively.INDEX TERMS 3D gaze estimation, gaze tracking, eye tracker.

3D Point-of-Intention Determination Using a Multimodal Fusion of Hand Pointing and Eye Gaze for a 3D Display

“…Ref. [ 33 ] proposed translating the head by a short distance to find another eye gaze vector and using the crossing point of the two eye gaze vectors as the 3D POI. The constraint of the method is that users have to move their heads slightly.…”

“…In addition to the constant saccades of human eyes, it is found that the pupil positions sometimes disappear in the data series of pupil positions in the time domain. Therefore, the saccades and blinks of the human eye cause vibrations and outstanding peaks, respectively, as shown in Figure 4 a. W. Pichitwong and K. Chamnongthai [ 33 ] take the average to determine the representative position of the pupil and, therefore, errors occur due to pupil disappearance. If we take derivatives between consecutive time frames, the differentiation results detect peaks that represent the starting and ending points of a blink or pupil disappearance duration, as shown by ( and ) duration in Figure 4 b.…”

“…If we take derivatives between consecutive time frames, the differentiation results detect peaks that represent the starting and ending points of a blink or pupil disappearance duration, as shown by ( and ) duration in Figure 4 b. These pupil disappearance durations are detected and ignored in the method proposed in this paper, and the original signal representing the pupil position becomes an analog signal including only the vibration of saccades, as shown in Figure 4 c. Therefore, the average position of the signal is improved as compared with that in the conventional method [ 33 ].…”

Learning a 3D Gaze Estimator With Adaptive Weighted Strategy

“…1/e l 1/e f + 1/e l + 1/e r λ r = 1/e r 1/e f + 1/e l + 1/e r (5) Considering that the error between the predicted value and the actual target value in the images of the three regions will be different, we calculate the mean square error between the predicted value and the target value. As mentioned above, the regression network can predict the gaze vector by the high-quality face and eye images.…”

“…The gaze vector can be speculated from the pupil to the target's attention. It has been increasingly important as a non-verbal cue in many fields, including marketing and consumer research [1], [2], human-computer interaction [3]- [5], medical care [6]- [8], aviation and vehicle driving [9], and criminal investigation [10]- [12]. However, the existing gaze estimation systems often have the following defects: redundancy calibration process, low tolerance to head movement, limitation of lighting conditions and complex system settings, which limit the commercial promotion of gaze estimation.…”