Real-time Gaze Tracking with Head-eye Coordination for Head-mounted Displays

High-accuracy, low-latency gaze tracking is becoming one of the indispensable features in augmented reality (AR) head-mounted devices (HMDs). Researchers have proposed different approaches to predict gaze positions from eye images. However, since only the eye modality is focused, these appearance-based algorithms are still struggle to trade off the accuracy and running speed in HMDs. In this paper, we propose a lightweight multi-modal network (HE-Tracker) to regress gaze positions. By fusing head-movement features with eye features, HE-Tracker achieves comparable accuracy (3.655° in all subjects) and $27 \times$ speedup (48 fps in the specialized AR HMD) compared to the state-of-the-art gaze tracking algorithm. We further demonstrate that when applying our head-eye coordination strategy to other baseline models, all these models achieve at least 6.36% performance improvement without a pronounced effect on running speed. Moreover, we construct HE-Gaze, the first multi-modal dataset with eye images and head-movement data for near-eye gaze tracking. This dataset is currently made of 757,360 frames and 15 persons, providing an opportunity to foster research in multi-modal gaze tracking approaches. Our dataset is available at DOWNLOAD LINK
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