FACET: Fast and Accurate Event-Based Eye Tracking Using Ellipse Modeling for Extended Reality
Junyuan Ding, Ziteng Wang, Chang Gao, Min Liu, Qinyu Chen
Abstract
Eye tracking is a key technology for gaze-based interactions in Extended Reality (XR), but traditional frame-based systems struggle to meet XR's demands for high accuracy, low latency, and power efficiency. Event cameras offer a promising alternative due to their high temporal resolution and low power consumption. In this paper, we present FACET (Fast and Accurate Event-based Eye Tracking), an end-to-end neural network that directly outputs pupil ellipse parameters from event data, optimized for real-time XR applications. The ellipse output can be directly used in subsequent ellipse-based pupil trackers. We enhance the EV-Eye dataset by expanding annotated data and converting original mask labels to ellipse-based annotations to train the model. Besides, a novel trigonometric loss is adopted to address angle discontinuities and a fast causal event volume event representation method is put forward. On the enhanced EV-Eye test set, FACET achieves an average pupil center error of <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\mathbf{0. 2 0}$</tex> pixels and an inference time of 0.53 ms, reducing pixel error and inference time by <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$1.6 \times$</tex> and <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$1.8 \times$</tex> compared to the prior art, EV-Eye, with <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$4.4 \times$</tex> and <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$11.7 \times$</tex> less parameters and arithmetic operations. The code is available at https://github.com/DeanJY/FACET.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{icra2025_facetfastandaccu,
title = {FACET: Fast and Accurate Event-Based Eye Tracking Using Ellipse Modeling for Extended Reality},
author = {Junyuan Ding and Ziteng Wang and Chang Gao and Min Liu and Qinyu Chen},
booktitle = {ICRA 2025},
year = {2025}
}