Lightweight, low-cost, side-mounted mobile eye tracking system

Commercial mobile eye tracking systems are readily available, but are costly and complex. They have an additional disadvantage in that the eye cameras are placed directly in the field of view of the subject in order to obtain a clear frontal view of the eye. We propose a lightweight, low-cost, side-mounted mobile eye tracking system that uses side-view eye images to estimate the gaze of the subject. Cameras are mounted on the side of the head using curved mirrors to split the captured frames into scene and eye images. A hybrid algorithm using both feature-based models and appearance-based models is designed to accommodate this novel system. Image sequences, consisting of 4339 frames from seven subjects are analyzed by the algorithm, resulting in a successful gaze estimation rate of 95.7%.