Eye movement simulation and detector creation to reduce laborious parameter adjustments

Eye movements hold information about human perception, intention and cognitive state. Various algorithms have been proposed to identify and distinguish eye movements, particularly fixations, saccades, and smooth pursuits. A major drawback of existing algorithms is that they rely on accurate and constant sampling rates, impeding straightforward adaptation to new movements such as micro saccades. We propose a novel eye movement simulator that i) probabilistically simulates saccade movements as gamma distributions considering different peak velocities and ii) models smooth pursuit onsets with the sigmoid function. This simulator is combined with a machine learning approach to create detectors for general and specific velocity profiles. Additionally, our approach is capable of using any sampling rate, even with fluctuations. The machine learning approach consists of different binary patterns combined using conditional distributions. The simulation is evaluated against publicly available real data using a squared error, and the detectors are evaluated against state-of-the-art algorithms.

PuRe: Robust pupil detection for real-time pervasive eye tracking

Real-time, accurate, and robust pupil detection is an essential prerequisite to enable pervasive eye-tracking and its applications -- e.g., gaze-based human computer interaction, health monitoring, foveated rendering, and advanced driver assistance. However, automated pupil detection has proved to be an intricate task in real-world scenarios due to a large mixture of challenges such as quickly changing illumination and occlusions. In this paper, we introduce the Pupil Reconstructor PuRe, a method for pupil detection in pervasive scenarios based on a novel edge segment selection and conditional segment combination schemes; the method also includes a confidence measure for the detected pupil. The proposed method was evaluated on over 316,000 images acquired with four distinct head-mounted eye tracking devices. Results show a pupil detection rate improvement of over 10 percentage points w.r.t. state-of-the-art algorithms in the two most challenging data sets (6.46 for all data sets), further pushing the envelope for pupil detection. Moreover, we advance the evaluation protocol of pupil detection algorithms by also considering eye images in which pupils are not present. In this aspect, PuRe improved precision and specificity w.r.t. state-of-the-art algorithms by 25.05 and 10.94 percentage points, respectively, demonstrating the meaningfulness of PuRe's confidence measure. PuRe operates in real-time for modern eye trackers (at 120 fps).

Fast camera focus estimation for gaze-based focus control

Many cameras implement auto-focus functionality. However, they typically require the user to manually identify the location to be focused on. While such an approach works for temporally-sparse autofocusing functionality (e.g., photo shooting), it presents extreme usability problems when the focus must be quickly switched between multiple areas (and depths) of interest - e.g., in a gaze-based autofocus approach. This work introduces a novel, real-time auto-focus approach based on eye-tracking, which enables the user to shift the camera focus plane swiftly based solely on the gaze information. Moreover, the proposed approach builds a graph representation of the image to estimate depth plane surfaces and runs in real time (requiring ~20ms on a single i5 core), thus allowing for the depth map estimation to be performed dynamically. We evaluated our algorithm for gaze-based depth estimation against state-of-the-art approaches based on eight new data sets with flat, skewed, and round surfaces, as well as publicly available datasets.

PupilNet v2.0: Convolutional Neural Networks for CPU based real time Robust Pupil Detection

Real-time, accurate, and robust pupil detection is an essential prerequisite for pervasive video-based eye-tracking. However, automated pupil detection in realworld scenarios has proven to be an intricate challenge due to fast illumination changes, pupil occlusion, non-centered and off-axis eye recording, as well as physiological eye characteristics. In this paper, we approach this challenge through: I) a convolutional neural network (CNN) running in real time on a single core, II) a novel computational intensive two stage CNN for accuracy improvement, and III) a fast propability distribution based refinement method as a practical alternative to II. We evaluate the proposed approaches against the state-of-the-art pupil detection algorithms, improving the detection rate up to ~9% percent points on average over all data sets (~7% on one CPU core 7ms). This evaluation was performed on over 135,000 images: 94,000 images from the literature, and 41,000 new hand-labeled and challenging images contributed by this work (v1.0).

PupilNet: Convolutional Neural Networks for Robust Pupil Detection

Real-time, accurate, and robust pupil detection is an essential prerequisite for pervasive video-based eye-tracking. However, automated pupil detection in real-world scenarios has proven to be an intricate challenge due to fast illumination changes, pupil occlusion, non centered and off-axis eye recording, and physiological eye characteristics. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a method based on a novel dual convolutional neural network pipeline. In its first stage the pipeline performs coarse pupil position identification using a convolutional neural network and subregions from a downscaled input image to decrease computational costs. Using subregions derived from a small window around the initial pupil position estimate, the second pipeline stage employs another convolutional neural network to refine this position, resulting in an increased pupil detection rate up to 25% in comparison with the best performing state-of-the-art algorithm. Annotated data sets can be made available upon request.

Bayesian Identification of Fixations, Saccades, and Smooth Pursuits

Smooth pursuit eye movements provide meaningful insights and information on subject's behavior and health and may, in particular situations, disturb the performance of typical fixation/saccade classification algorithms. Thus, an automatic and efficient algorithm to identify these eye movements is paramount for eye-tracking research involving dynamic stimuli. In this paper, we propose the Bayesian Decision Theory Identification (I-BDT) algorithm, a novel algorithm for ternary classification of eye movements that is able to reliably separate fixations, saccades, and smooth pursuits in an online fashion, even for low-resolution eye trackers. The proposed algorithm is evaluated on four datasets with distinct mixtures of eye movements, including fixations, saccades, as well as straight and circular smooth pursuits; data was collected with a sample rate of 30 Hz from six subjects, totaling 24 evaluation datasets. The algorithm exhibits high and consistent performance across all datasets and movements relative to a manual annotation by a domain expert (recall: \mu = 91.42%, \sigma = 9.52%; precision: \mu = 95.60%, \sigma = 5.29%; specificity \mu = 95.41%, \sigma = 7.02%) and displays a significant improvement when compared to I-VDT, an state-of-the-art algorithm (recall: \mu = 87.67%, \sigma = 14.73%; precision: \mu = 89.57%, \sigma = 8.05%; specificity \mu = 92.10%, \sigma = 11.21%). For algorithm implementation and annotated datasets, please contact the first author.