Towards an Accurate 3D Deformable Eye Model for Gaze Estimation.

3D eye gaze estimation has emerged as an interesting and challenging task in recent years. As an attractive alternative to appearance-based models, 3D model-based gaze estimation methods are powerful because a general prior of eye anatomy or geometry has been integrated into the 3D model hence they adapt well under various head poses and illumination conditions. We present a method for constructing an anatomically accurate 3D deformable eye model from the IR images of eyes and demonstrate its application to 3D gaze estimation. The 3D eye model consists of a deformable basis capable of representing individual real-world eyeballs, corneas, irises and kappa angles. To validate the model’s accuracy, we combine it with a 3D face model (without eyeball) and perform image-based fitting to obtain eye basis coefficients The fitted eyeball is then used to compute 3D gaze direction. Evaluation results on multiple datasets show that the proposed method generalizes well across datasets and is robust under various head poses.