A Comparative Study of Gaze Estimation Models

The eye-mind hypothesis suggests that people tend to look at what they're actively thinking about, forming the basis of eye and gaze tracking. This concept is gaining attention in deep learning due to its broad applications. The use of AI alongside webcams to monitor eye movements is increasingly popular and expected to grow further. This is further emphasized by recent data showing a growing use of eye gaze estimation techniques, especially in marketing research, e-commerce, and educational tools. Accordingly, multiple previous research works have developed various eye and gaze estimation and tracking models. However, one main limitation is that many models use their own datasets for performance evaluation as well as having different underlying computing resources that are used during training. Consequently, it becomes harder to compare the effectiveness and efficiency of these models. To that end, this work aims at providing a comprehensive comparative study of three well-established eye gaze estimation models, namely OpenGaze, GazeRefineNet, ODABE, and FAZE models using a unified evaluation framework. Experimental results conducted using GazeCapture dataset illustrate that OpenGaze model achieves a mean error of 2.27 cm mean error, GazeRefineNet model achieves 1.91 cm, ODABE model achieves 3.46 cm, and FAZE model achieves 2.9 cm. This indicates that GazeRefineNet outperforms the other models in terms of accuracy while having comparable computational complexity.