Remote Eye Tracking Systems: Technologies and Applications

Eye tracking is an active multidisciplinary research field, which has shown great progress in the last decades. Eye tracking is the process of monitoring eye movements in order to determine the point of gaze or to analyze motion patterns of an eye relative to the head or the environment. This process provides essential information to tasks such as face detection, usability testing, biometric identification, human behavior studies and human-computer interaction, among others. The term \textit{remote} is used whenever the eye tracker components do not have any physical contact with the user's body. In general, highly accurate commercial eye trackers are expensive. However, nowadays it is possible to develop low-cost remote eye tracking systems with off-the-shelf hardware components. By this perspective, an overview of eye tracking technologies and applications is given in this paper, and the state-of-the-art work in the field is discussed as well. Moreover, hardware components and underlying computer vision processes are also presented in this paper.

I. Introduction

Eye tracking aims to estimate the gaze direction and attention focus based on the monitoring of ocular activities [1]. Gaze direction can be estimated from the identification of the line of sight (LoS), i.e., the line that represents the visual axis of the eye structure [2]. On the other hand, the focus of attention is the point of highest interest in the visual field, also known as point of regard (PoR) in the literature [3] – [5].