Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

11-2024

Abstract

Eye-tracking technology has gained significant attention in recent years due to its wide range of applications in humancomputer interaction, virtual and augmented reality, and wearable health. Traditional RGB camera-based eye-tracking systems often struggle with poor temporal resolution and computational constraints, limiting their effectiveness in capturing rapid eye movements. To address these limitations, we propose EyeTrAES, a novel approach using neuromorphic event cameras for high-fidelity tracking of natural pupillary movement that shows significant kinematic variance. One of EyeTrAES’s highlights is the use of a novel adaptive windowing/slicing algorithm that ensures just the right amount of descriptive asynchronous event data accumulation within an event frame, across a wide range of eye movement patterns. EyeTrAES then applies lightweight image processing functions over accumulated event frames from just a single eye to perform pupil segmentation and tracking (as opposed to gaze-based techniques that require simultaneous tracking of both eyes). We show that these two techniques boost pupil tracking fidelity by 6+%, achieving IoU∼=92%, while incurring at least 3x lower latency than competing pure event-based eye tracking alternatives [38]. We additionally demonstrate that the microscopic pupillary motion captured by EyeTrAES exhibits distinctive variations across individuals and can thus serve as a biometric fingerprint. For robust user authentication, we train a lightweight per-user Random Forest classifier using a novel feature vector of short-term pupillary kinematics, comprising a sliding window of pupil (location, velocity, acceleration) triples. Experimental studies with two different datasets (capturing eye movement across a range of environmental contexts) demonstrate that the EyeTrAES-based authentication technique can simultaneously achieve high authentication accuracy (∼=0.82) and low processing latency (∼=12ms), and significantly outperform multiple state-of-the-art competitive baselines

Keywords

Ubiquitous and mobile computing, Eye tracking, Event cameras, Adaptive event sampling, Authentication

Discipline

Databases and Information Systems | Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Areas of Excellence

Digital transformation

Publication

Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies

Volume

8

Issue

4

First Page

1

Last Page

32

ISSN

2474-9567

Identifier

10.1145/3699745

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

Comments

pdf provided by faculty

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1145/3699745

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