Calibration in Eye Tracking Using Transfer Learning

Abstract: This thesis empirically studies transfer learning as a calibration framework for Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based appearance-based gaze estimation models. A dataset of approximately 1,900,000 eyestripe images distributed over 1682 subjects is used to train and evaluate several gaze estimation models. Each model is initially trained on the training data resulting in generic gaze models. The models are subsequently calibrated for each test subject, using the subject's calibration data, by applying transfer learning through network fine-tuning on the final layers of the network. Transfer learning is observed to reduce the Euclidean distance error of the generic models within the range of 12-21%, which is in line with current state-of-the-art. The best performing calibrated model shows a mean error of 29.53mm and a median error of 22.77mm. However, calibrating heatmap output-based gaze estimation models decreases the performance over the generic models. It is concluded that transfer learning is a viable calibration framework for improving the performance of CNN-based appearance based gaze estimation models.