Event Based, Near Eye Gaze Tracking Beyond 10,000Hz

Fast and accurate eye tracking is crucial for many applications. Current camera-based eye tracking systems, however, are fundamentally limited by their bandwidth, forcing a tradeoff between image resolution and framerate, i.e. between latency and update rate. Here, we propose a hybrid frame-event-based near-eye gaze tracking system offering update rates beyond 10,000 Hz with an accuracy that matches that of high-end desktop-mounted commercial eye trackers when evaluated in the same conditions. Our system builds on emerging event cameras that simultaneously acquire regularly sampled frames and adaptively sampled events. We develop an online 2D pupil fitting method that updates a parametric model every one or few events. Moreover, we propose a polynomial regressor for estimating the gaze vector from the parametric pupil model in real time. Using the first hybrid frame-event gaze dataset, which will be made public, we demonstrate that our system achieves accuracies of 0.45 degrees -- 1.75 degrees for fields of view ranging from 45 degrees to 98 degrees.