Gaze-angle dependency of pupil-size measurements in head-mounted eye tracking

Abstract

Pupillometry - the study of temporal changes in pupil diameter as a function of external light stimuli or cognitive processing - requires the accurate and gaze-angle independent measurement of pupil dilation. Expected response amplitudes often are only a few percent relative to a pre-stimulus baseline, thus demanding for sub-millimeter accuracy. Video-based approaches to pupil-size measurement aim at inferring pupil dilation from eye images alone. Eyeball rotation in relation to the recording camera as well as optical effects due to refraction at corneal interfaces can, however, induce so-called pupil foreshortening errors (PFE), i.e. systematic gaze-angle dependent changes of apparent pupil size that are on a par with typical response amplitudes. While PFE and options for its correction have been discussed for remote eye trackers, for head-mounted eye trackers such an assessment is still lacking. In this work, we therefore gauge the extent of PFE in three measurement techniques, all based on eye images recorded with a single near-eye camera. We present both real world experimental data as well as results obtained on synthetically generated eye images. We discuss PFE effects at three different levels of data aggregation: the sample, subject, and population level. In particular, we show that a recently proposed refraction-aware approach employing a mathematical 3D eye model is successful in providing pupil-size measurements which are gaze-angle independent at the population level.