Gaze Estimation

Retinal image-based eye tracking is widely used in ophthalmic imaging and vision science, and is a promising path to deliver higher gaze accuracy than the pupil- and cornea-based approaches commonly used in modern AR/VR devices. Nevertheless, existing retinal tracking algorithms still primarily rely on classical template-matching registration, which can be insufficiently robust to retinal feature variability and real-world imaging conditions. In this work, we propose a novel weakly-supervised, learning-based framework for robust retinal eye tracking. Initial studies demonstrate high accuracy, achieving the 95th-percentile gaze error < 0.45 deg across a cohort of 6 participants.

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.

While zero-shot appearance-based 3D gaze estimation offers significant cost-efficiency by directly mapping RGB images to gaze vectors, its reliability in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) settings remains uncertain. Existing benchmarks frequently overlook fundamental HRI conditions, such as dynamic camera viewpoints and moving targets in video. Furthermore, current cross-dataset evaluations often suffer from a complexity gap, where methods trained on diverse datasets are tested on significantly smaller and less varied sets, failing to assess true robustness. To bridge these gaps, we introduce Gaze4HRI, a large-scale dataset (50+ subjects, 3,000+ videos, 600,000+ frames) designed to evaluate state-of-the-art performance against critical HRI variables: illumination, head-gaze conflict, as well as the motion of camera and gaze target in video. Our benchmark reveals that all evaluated methods fail in at least one condition, identifying steeply-downward gaze as a universal failure point. Notably, PureGaze trained on the ETH-X-Gaze dataset uniquely maintains resilience across all other conditions. These results challenge the recent focus in the literature on complex spatial-temporal modeling and Transformer-based architectures. Instead, our findings suggest that extensive data diversity, as exemplified by the ETH-X-Gaze dataset, serves as the primary driver of zero-shot robustness in unconstrained environments, while resilience-enhancing frameworks, such as PureGaze's self-adversarial loss for gaze feature purification, provide a substantial further improvement. Ultimately, this study establishes a rigorous benchmark that provides practical guidelines for practitioners as well as reshaping future research. The dataset and codes are available at https://gazeforhri.github.io.

Gaze estimation methods commonly use facial appearances to predict the direction of a person gaze. However, previous studies show three major challenges with convolutional neural network (CNN)-based, transformer-based, and contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP)-based methods, including late fusion of image features, lack of factor-aware conditioning, and impractical capacity scaling. To address these challenges, we propose Globally-conditioned Multi-scale Gaze estimation (GMGaze), which leverages a multi-scale transformer architecture. Specifically, the model first introduces semantic prototype conditioning, which modulates the CLIP global image embedding using four learned prototype banks (i.e., illumination, background, head pose and appearance) to generate two complementary context-biased global tokens. These tokens, along with the CLIP patch and CNN tokens, are fused at the first layer. This early unified fusion prevents information loss common in late-stage merging. Finally, each token passes through sparse Mixture-of-Experts modules, providing conditional computational capacity without uniformly increasing dense parameters. For cross-domain adaptation, we incorporate an adversarial domain adaptation technique with a feature separation loss that encourages the two global tokens to remain de-correlated. Experiments using four public benchmarks (MPIIFaceGaze, EYEDIAP, Gaze360, and ETH-XGaze) show that GMGaze achieves mean angular errors of 2.49$^\circ$, 3.22$^\circ$, 10.16$^\circ$, and 1.44$^\circ$, respectively, outperforming previous baselines in all within-domain settings. In cross-domain evaluations, it provides state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on two standard transfer routes.

Interpretable driver attention prediction is crucial for human-like autonomous driving. However, existing datasets provide only scene-level global gaze rather than fine-grained object-level annotations, inherently failing to support text-grounded cognitive modeling. Consequently, while Vision-Language Models (VLMs) hold great potential for semantic reasoning, this critical data limitations leads to severe text-vision decoupling and visual-bias hallucinations. To break this bottleneck and achieve precise object-level attention prediction, this paper proposes a novel dual-branch gaze prediction framework, establishing a complete paradigm from data construction to model architecture. First, we construct G-W3DA, a object-level driver attention dataset. By integrating a multimodal large language model with the Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM3), we decouple macroscopic heatmaps into object-level masks under rigorous cross-validation, fundamentally eliminating annotation hallucinations. Building upon this high-quality data foundation, we propose the DualGaze-VLM architecture. This architecture extracts the hidden states of semantic queries and dynamically modulates visual features via a Condition-Aware SE-Gate, achieving intent-driven precise spatial anchoring. Extensive experiments on the W3DA benchmark demonstrate that DualGaze-VLM consistently surpasses existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) models in spatial alignment metrics, notably achieving up to a 17.8% improvement in Similarity (SIM) under safety-critical scenarios. Furthermore, a visual Turing test reveals that the attention heatmaps generated by DualGaze-VLM are perceived as authentic by 88.22% of human evaluators, proving its capability to generate rational cognitive priors.

Driver gaze estimation is essential for understanding the driver's situational awareness of surrounding traffic. Existing gaze estimation models use driver facial information to predict the Point-of-Gaze (PoG) or the 3D gaze direction vector. We propose a benchmark dataset, Urban Driving-Face Scene Gaze (UD-FSG), comprising synchronized driver-face and traffic-scene images. The scene images provide cues about surrounding traffic, which can help improve the gaze estimation model, along with the face images. We propose SGAP-Gaze, Scene-Grid Attention based Point-of-Gaze estimation network, trained and tested on our UD-FSG dataset, which explicitly incorporates the scene images into the gaze estimation modelling. The gaze estimation network integrates driver face, eye, iris, and scene contextual information. First, the extracted features from facial modalities are fused to form a gaze intent vector. Then, attention scores are computed over the spatial scene grid using a Transformer-based attention mechanism fusing face and scene image features to obtain the PoG. The proposed SGAP-Gaze model achieves a mean pixel error of 104.73 on the UD-FSG dataset and 63.48 on LBW dataset, achieving a 23.5% reduction in mean pixel error compared to state-of-the-art driver gaze estimation models. The spatial pixel distribution analysis shows that SGAP-Gaze consistently achieves lower mean pixel error than existing methods across all spatial ranges, including the outer regions of the scene, which are rare but critical for understanding driver attention. These results highlight the effectiveness of integrating multi-modal gaze cues with scene-aware attention for a robust driver PoG estimation model in real-world driving environments.

Generalizable gaze estimation methods have garnered increasing attention due to their critical importance in real-world applications and have achieved significant progress. However, they often overlook the effect of label noise, arising from the inherent difficulty of acquiring precise gaze annotations, on model generalization performance. In this paper, we are the first to comprehensively investigate the negative effects of label noise on generalization in gaze estimation. Further, we propose a novel solution, called See-Through-Noise (SeeTN) framework, which improves generalization from a novel perspective of mitigating label noise. Specifically, we propose to construct a semantic embedding space via a prototype-based transformation to preserve a consistent topological structure between gaze features and continuous labels. We then measure feature-label affinity consistency to distinguish noisy from clean samples, and introduce a novel affinity regularization in the semantic manifold to transfer gaze-related information from clean to noisy samples. Our proposed SeeTN promotes semantic structure alignment and enforces domain-invariant gaze relationships, thereby enhancing robustness against label noise. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our SeeTN effectively mitigates the adverse impact of source-domain noise, leading to superior cross-domain generalization without compromising the source-domain accuracy, and highlight the importance of explicitly handling noise in generalized gaze estimation.

Eye tracking (ET) plays a critical role in augmented and virtual reality applications. However, rapidly deploying high-accuracy, on-device gaze estimation for new products remains challenging because hardware configurations (e.g., camera placement, camera pose, and illumination) often change across device generations. Visual foundation models (VFMs) excel on natural-image benchmarks and offer a promising path to rapid training and deployment; yet, we find that off-the-shelf VFMs still struggle to reach high accuracy on specialized near-eye infrared images. To close this gap, we introduce DistillGaze, a framework that distills a VFM using labeled synthetic data and unlabeled real data for rapid, high-accuracy on-device gaze estimation. DistillGaze proceeds in two stages. First, we adapt a VFM into a domain-specialized teacher using synthetic gaze labels and unlabeled real images. Synthetic data provide scalable, high-quality gaze supervision, while unlabeled real data bridges the synthetic-to-real domain gap. Second, we train an on-device student from both teacher guidance and self-training. Evaluated on a large-scale crowd-sourced dataset spanning more than 2,000 participants, DistillGaze reduces median gaze error by 58.6% relative to synthetic-only baselines while maintaining a lightweight 256K-parameter model suitable for real-time on-device deployment. More broadly, DistillGaze offers an efficient path to training and deploying ET models that adapt to hardware changes, and a recipe for combining synthetic supervision with unlabeled real data in on-device regression tasks.

Appearance-based gaze estimation (AGE) has achieved remarkable performance in constrained settings, yet we reveal a significant generalization gap where existing AGE models often fail in practical, unconstrained scenarios, particularly those involving facial wearables and poor lighting conditions. We attribute this failure to two core factors: limited image diversity and inconsistent label fidelity across different datasets, especially along the pitch axis. To address these, we propose a robust AGE framework that enhances generalization without requiring additional human-annotated data. First, we expand the image manifold via an ensemble of augmentation techniques, including synthesis of eyeglasses, masks, and varied lighting. Second, to mitigate the impact of anisotropic inter-dataset label deviation, we reformulate gaze regression as a multi-task learning problem, incorporating multi-view supervised contrastive (SupCon) learning, discretized label classification, and eye-region segmentation as auxiliary objectives. To rigorously validate our approach, we curate new benchmark datasets designed to evaluate gaze robustness under challenging conditions, a dimension largely overlooked by existing evaluation protocols. Our MobileNet-based lightweight model achieves generalization performance competitive with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) UniGaze-H, while utilizing less than 1% of its parameters, enabling high-fidelity, real-time gaze tracking on mobile devices.

Mobile eye-tracking is crucial for capturing human visual attention in real-world and XR settings, supporting research and human-computer interaction. Yet blinks, pupil-detection errors and lighting changes create missing values that hinder gaze analysis. We present HAGI++, a multi-modal diffusion-based imputation method that, for the first time, leverages integrated head-orientation sensors to exploit the natural correlation between head and eye movements. Using a transformer-based diffusion model, it learns cross-modal dependencies between eye and head data and can additionally incorporate wrist/hand motion when such wearable signals are available. Evaluations on the large-scale Nymeria, Ego-Exo4D and HOT3D datasets show that HAGI++ consistently outperforms traditional interpolation and deep-learning time-series imputation baselines. Statistical analysis confirms that its gaze-velocity distributions closely match real human behaviour, yielding realistic imputations. Even when 100% of gaze data are missing (pure gaze generation), HAGI++ exceeds methods that rely on the visual inputs and the methods rely on full-body motion capture by incorporating wrist motion from commercial wearables. Our approach enables more complete, accurate eye-gaze recordings in real-world contexts, enhancing gaze-based analysis and interaction across many applications. Our code is available at https://git.cai.simtech.uni-stuttgart.de/public-projects/HAGI

Browser-based webcam gaze trackers are increasingly used for crowd-scale data collection and in clinical settings where lab eye trackers are impractical, but the reported latency numbers may not represent real world functionality. The common practice of timestamping each gaze sample when it is emitted, rather than when its source frame was captured, makes the measured inference latency read about $0\,$ms no matter how slow the engine really is. We show how to measure it honestly, recovering a per-frame capture clock from the browser's \texttt{re-quest-Video-Frame-Call-back} (rVFC) API (\texttt{captureTime} where the browser exposes it for local camera streams, else \texttt{presentationTime}, in which case every recovered latency is a verifiable lower bound): exact source-frame pairing through a per-frame queue for engines that expose their inference pipeline, and a further lower bound for engines that do not, such as WebGazer. We release an open TypeScript implementation and benchmark harness, demonstrated on two interchangeable engines: WebGazer and a new FaceMesh+KRR pipeline.