A GPU-accelerated software eye tracking system

Abstract

Current microcomputers are powerful enough to implement a realtime eye tracking system, but the computational throughput still limits the types of algorithms that can be implemented in real time. Many of the image processing algorithms that are typically used in eye tracking applications can be significantly accelerated when the processing is delegated to a graphics processing unit (GPU). This paper describes a real-time gaze tracking system developed using the CUDA programming environment distributed by nVidia. The current implementation of the system is capable of processing a 640 by 480 image in less than 4 milliseconds, and achieves an average accuracy close to 0.5 degrees of visual angle.