Reconstruction of display and eyes from a single image

Dirk Schnieders, Xingdou Fu, Kwan-Yee Kenneth Wong

Abstract: This paper introduces a novel method for reconstructing human eyes and visual display from reflections on the cornea. This problem is difficult because the camera is not directly facing the display, but instead captures the eyes of a person in front of the display. Reconstruction of eyes and display is useful for point-of-gaze estimation, which can be approximated from the 3D positions of the iris and display. It is shown that iris boundaries (limbus) and display reflections in a single intrinsically calibrated image provide enough information for such an estimation. The proposed method assumes a simplified geometric eyeball model with certain anatomical constants which are used to reconstruct the eye. A noise performance analysis shows the sensitivity of the proposed method to imperfect data. Experiments on various subjects show that it is possible to determine the approximate area of gaze on a display from a single image.