Refraction – Bending over backwards to fit an eye

Recently, together with Moritz Kassner and Andreas Bulling, I have published a paper at Pupil Labs, the company I currently work for. In this work, we present a novel method for fitting a 3D eye model to a set of eye images obtained by a near eye camera. Such cameras, which produce close-up images of a user’s eye, are utilized in the Pupil headset, an eye tracking solution developed and sold by Pupil Labs. Based on the obtained fit of the eye model, the gaze direction of a user can be inferred from additional eye images. In particular, our work incorporates a specific physical effect, namely refraction, which is responsible for the bending of light rays entering or leaving the eye (see sketch above). Using both pure simulation, as well as real eye images, we were able to show that this optical effect, which is important for the normal funcitoning of the eye, also has important repercussions when estimating the direction of a person’s gaze from eye images. We were very happy to be chosen to present our work in Warsaw at ETRA 2018, a major conference dedicated to the technology and applications of eye tracking.

If your are interested, here is the reference of the original paper:

K. Dierkes, M. Kassner, A. Bulling. A novel approach to single camera, glint-free 3D eye model fitting including corneal refraction. In ETRA ’18: 2018 Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications, June 14–17, 2018, Warsaw, Poland. ACM, New York, NY, USA.