Estimation of Visual Gaze

Abstract

Studying gaze direction is useful for the completion of visual tasks. It is well known that the visual gaze is a product of two contributing factors: head pose and eye location. In general, the visual gaze can be determined from head pose when standing at some distance from the visual target [76]. Starting from this general statement, the present chapter will first detail the human visual system and the steps that are necessary to generate the gaze. An account of the completed works on gaze tracking will then be presented along with selected techniques according to the different types of systems (intrusive or non-intrusive). A few applications will be introduced afterwards to illustrate how data collected from the gaze are processed. Finally, we will examine how the head pose contributes to visual gaze estimation, and also how to estimate the gaze based on eye position only.