Real-Time Gaze Tracking with Event-Driven Eye Segmentation

Gaze tracking is increasingly becoming an essential component in Augmented and Virtual Reality. Modern gaze tracking algorithms are heavyweight; they operate at most 5 Hz on mobile processors despite that near-eye cameras comfortably operate at a real-time rate (> 30 Hz). This paper presents a real-time eye tracking algorithm that, on average, operates at 30 Hz on a mobile processor, achieves 0.1°–0.5° gaze accuracies, all the while requiring only 30K parameters, one to two orders of magnitude smaller than state-of-the-art eye tracking algorithms. The crux of our algorithm is an Auto ROI mode, which continuously predicts the Regions of Interest (ROIs) of near-eye images and judiciously processes only the ROIs for gaze estimation. To that end, we introduce a novel, lightweight ROI prediction algorithm by emulating an event camera. We discuss how a software emulation of events enables accurate ROI prediction without requiring special hardware. The code of our paper is available at https://github.com/horizon-research/edgaze.