Eye-tracking system uses ordinary cellphone camera
For the past 40 years, eye-tracking technology — which can determine where in a visual scene people are directing their gaze — has been widely used in psychological experiments and marketing research, but it’s required pricey hardware that has kept it from finding consumer applications. Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the University of Georgia hope to change that, with software that can turn any smartphone into an eye-tracking device. They describe their new system in a paper they’re presenting on June 28 at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference. In addition to making existing applications of eye-tracking technology more accessible, the system could enable new computer interfaces or help detect signs of incipient neurological disease or mental illness. “The field is kind of stuck in this chicken-and-egg loop,” says Aditya Khosla, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science and co-first author on the paper....