Estimating gaze from a single view of a face

Current approaches to gaze tracking tend to be highly intrusive: the subject must either remain perfectly still, or wear cumbersome headgear to maintain a constant separation between the sensor and the eye. This paper describes a more flexible vision-based approach, which can estimate the direction of gaze from a single, monocular view of a face. The technique makes minimal assumptions about the structure of the face, requires very few image measurements, and produces a useful estimate of the facial orientation. The computational requirements are insignificant, so with automatic tracking of a few facial features it is possible to produce real-time gaze estimates.