Binocular Gaze Estimation with Single Camera and Single Light Source

This paper presents a marker-free eye-gaze estimation approach using a single 2D camera, such as an integrated laptop webcam. The gaze-related features are estimated from iris localization and head pose estimated by using depth from defocus. A variational Bayesian multinomial logistic regression framework is used as mapping from the estimated features to the position of regard, based on an 8-dimensional feature vector of head-pose and iris-displacement parameters. No external marker is needed. Experiments were conducted by estimating the gaze of people watching a computer screen at different distances and compared against five existing methods. The obtained scores demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

We present PicoEyes, a unified gaze estimation framework that directly predicts all key attributes of gaze, including 3D eye parameters, eye-region segmentation, optical axis, visual axis, and depth maps, from either monocular or binocular inputs. The framework simultaneously addresses calibration, gaze forecasting, and varying device postures, while also supporting 3D eye reconstruction via joint estimation of eye parameters and depth maps in an end-to-end manner. In addition, we introduce a large-scale multi-view near-eye dataset containing comprehensive 2D and 3D annotations under diverse conditions, including train, test, rewear-test, and calibration sessions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PicoEyes achieves state-ofthe-art performance, consistently outperforming both academic and industrial gaze tracking methods across nocalibration, calibration, rewear-after-calibration, and forecasting settings. This work establishes a practical, end-toend paradigm for robust and generalizable gaze estimation in mixed reality (MR) applications.

Gaze target estimation, the task of predicting where a person is looking in a scene, is crucial to understanding human attention and intent. It is a challenging task that combines high-level understanding of global scene semantics and precise spatial reasoning using human appearance (e.g. pose, eye orientation). As a result, human-level performance remains elusive for existing models, limiting their practical application. To this end, we propose PaGE (Practical Gaze Estimator), a gaze estimation model that explicitly models the complex interaction between scene and head features. Using a PaGE model with a large ViT-H+ backbone as the teacher, we further distill student models with lighter backbones on a much larger and more diverse unlabeled dataset. The architectural improvements and novel training recipe allow PaGE to achieve state-of-the-art performance on several gaze estimation tasks, outperforming humans in 7 out of 9 metrics while reducing the human-AI gap by at least 60% in the remaining 2. The distilled student models retain most of the teacher's performance while being lightweight enough for practical deployment on robots and consumer devices. The code and model checkpoints are available at our project page.