Eye Gaze Tracking Using an RGBD Camera

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]. UbiComp ’14, September 13 17 2014, Seattle, WA, USA Copyright 2014 ACM 978-1-4503-3047-3/14/09$15.00. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2638728.2641694 Abstract Most commercial eye gaze tracking systems are based on the use of infrared lights. However, such systems may not work outdoor or may have a very limited head box for them to work. This paper proposes a non-infrared based approach to track one’s eye gaze with an RGBD camera (in our case, Kinect). The proposed method adopts a personalized 3D face model constructed off-line. To detect the eye gaze, our system tracks the iris center and a set of 2D facial landmarks whose 3D locations are provided by the RGBD camera. A simple onetime calibration procedure is used to obtain the parameters of the personalized eye gaze model. We compare the performance of the proposed method against the 2D approach using only RGB input on the same images, and find that the use of depth information directly from Kinect achieves more accurate tracking. As expected, the results from the proposed method are not as accurate as the ones from infrared-based approaches. However, this method has the potential for practical use with upcoming better and cheaper depth cameras.