Eye Tracking Using a Smartphone Camera and Deep Learning
Adam Skowronek, Oleksandr Kuleshov · KTH Publication Database DiVA (KTH Royal Institute of Technology) · 2020
Tracking eye movements has been a central part in understanding attention and visual processing in the mind. Studying how the eyes move and what they fixate on during specific moments has been considered by some to offer a direct way to measure spatial attention. The underlying technology, known as eye tracking, has been used in order to reliably and accurately measure gaze. Despite the numerous benefits of eye tracking, research and development as well as commercial applications have been limited due to the cost and lack of scalability which the technology usually entails. The purpose and goal of this project is to make eye tracking more available to the common user by implementing and evaluating a new promising technique. The thesis explores the possibility of implementing a gaze tracking prototype using a normal smartphone camera. The hypothesis is to achieve accurate gaze estimation by utilizing deep learning neural networks and personalizing them to fit each individual. The resulting prototype is highly inaccurate in its estimations; however, adjusting a few key components such as the neural network initialization weights may lead to improved results.