Combining gaze estimation and optical flow for pursuits interaction

Abstract

Pursuit eye movements have become widely popular because they enable spontaneous eye-based interaction. However, existing methods to detect smooth pursuits require special-purpose eye trackers. We propose the first method to detect pursuits using a single off-the-shelf RGB camera in unconstrained remote settings. The key novelty of our method is that it combines appearance-based gaze estimation with optical flow in the eye region to jointly analyse eye movement dynamics in a single pipeline. We evaluate the performance and robustness of our method for different numbers of targets and trajectories in a 13-participant user study. We show that our method not only outperforms the current state of the art but also achieves competitive performance to a consumer eye tracker for a small number of targets. As such, our work points towards a new family of methods for pursuit interaction directly applicable to an ever-increasing number of devices readily equipped with cameras.