Continuous Gaze Tracking With Implicit Saliency-Aware Calibration on Mobile Devices
Songzhou Yang, Meng Jin, Yuan He
Abstract
Gaze tracking is a useful human-to-computer interface, which plays an increasingly important role in a range of mobile applications. Gaze calibration is an indispensable component of gaze tracking, which transforms the eye coordinates to the screen coordinates. The existing approaches of gaze tracking either have limited accuracy or require the user's cooperation in calibration and in turn hurt the quality of experience. We in this paper propose vGaze, continuous gaze tracking with implicit saliency-aware calibration on mobile devices. The design of vGaze stems from our insight on the temporal and spatial dependent relation between the visual saliency and the user's gaze. vGaze is implemented as a light-weight software that identifies video frames with “useful” saliency information, sensing the user's head movement, performs opportunistic calibration using only those “useful” frames, and leverages historical information for accelerating saliency detection. We implement vGaze on a commercial mobile device and evaluate its performance in various scenarios. The results show that vGaze can work at real time with video playback applications. The average error of gaze tracking is 1.51cm (2.884 <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^{\circ }$</tex-math></inline-formula> ) which decreases to 0.99cm (1.891 <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^{\circ }$</tex-math></inline-formula> ) with historical information and 0.57cm (1.089 <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^{\circ }$</tex-math></inline-formula> ) with an indicator.