Remote Eye Tracking Systems: Technologies and Applications

Abstract

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.