3D Gaze Estimation for Head-Mounted Devices based on Visual Saliency

Compared with the maturity of 2D gaze tracking technology, 3D gaze tracking has gradually become a research hotspot in recent years. The head-mounted gaze tracker has shown great potential for gaze estimation in 3D space due to its appealing flexibility and portability. The general challenge for 3D gaze tracking algorithms is that calibration is necessary before the usage, and calibration targets cannot be easily applied in some situations or might be blocked by moving human and objects. Besides, the accuracy on depth direction has always come to be a crucial problem. Regarding the issues mentioned above, a 3D gaze estimation with auto-calibration method is proposed in this study. We use an RGBD camera as the scene camera to acquire the accurate 3D structure of the environment. The automatic calibration is achieved by uniting gaze vectors with saliency maps of the scene which aligned depth information. Finally, we determine the 3D gaze point through a point cloud generated from the RGBD camera. The experiment result demonstrates that our proposed method achieves 4.34 degrees of average angle error in the field from 0.5m to 3m and the average depth error is 23.22mm, which is sufficient for 3D gaze estimation in the real scene.