Low-cost Gaze and Pulse Analysis using RealSense

Intel’s newly-announced low-cost and high precision RealSense 3D (RGBD) camera is becoming ubiquitous in laptops and mobile devices starting this year, opening the door for new applications in the mobile health arena. In this paper, we demonstrate how the Intel RealSense 3D camera can be used for low-cost gaze tracking and passive pulse rate estimation. We develop a novel 3D gaze and fixation tracker based on the eye surface geometry as well as an illumination invariant pulse rate estimation method using near-infrared images captured with RealSense. We achieve a mean error of 1 cm at 20 − 30 cm for the gaze tracker and 2.26 bpm (beats per minute) for pulse estimation, which is adequate in many medical applications, demonstrating the great potential of novel consumer-grade RGBD technology in mobile health.