Convolutional Neural Network-Based Methods for Eye Gaze Estimation: A Survey

Eye tracking is becoming a very important tool across many domains, including human-computer-interaction, psychology, computer vision, and medical diagnosis. Different methods have been used to tackle eye tracking, however, some of them are inaccurate under real-world conditions, while some require explicit user calibration which can be burdensome. Some of these methods suffer from poor image quality and variable light conditions. The recent success and prevalence of deep learning have greatly improved the performance of eye-tracking. The availability of large-scale datasets has further improved the performance of deep learning-based methods. This article presents a survey of the current state-of-the-art on deep learning-based gaze estimation techniques, with a focus on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). This article also provides a survey on other machine learning-based gaze estimation techniques. This study aims to empower the research community with valuable and useful insights that can enhance the design and development of improved and efficient deep learning-based eye-tracking models. This study also provides information on various pre-trained models, network architectures, and open-source datasets that are useful for training deep learning models.