Eye-tracking plays a crucial role in the development of virtual reality devices, neuroscience research, and psychology. Despite its significance in numerous applications, achieving an accurate, robust, and fast eye-tracking solution remains a considerable challenge for current state-of-the-art methods. While existing reflection-based techniques (e.g., "glint tracking") are considered the most accurate, their performance is limited by their reliance on sparse 3D surface data acquired solely from the cornea surface. In this paper, we rethink the way how specular reflections can be used for eye tracking: We propose a novel method for accurate and fast evaluation of the gaze direction that exploits teachings from single-shot phase-measuring-deflectometry (PMD). In contrast to state-of-the-art reflection-based methods, our method acquires dense 3D surface information of both cornea and sclera within only one single camera frame (single-shot). Improvements in acquired reflection surface points("glints") of factors $>3300 \times$ are easily achievable. We show the feasibility of our approach with experimentally evaluated gaze errors of only $\leq 0.25^\circ$ demonstrating a significant improvement over the current state-of-the-art.

翻译：眼动追踪在虚拟现实设备开发、神经科学研究和心理学中发挥着关键作用。尽管其在众多应用中具有重要意义，但实现精确、鲁棒且快速的眼动追踪解决方案对当前最先进方法而言仍是一项重大挑战。虽然现有的基于反射的技术（如“闪烁追踪”）被认为最为精确，但其性能受限于仅从角膜表面获取的稀疏三维表面数据。本文重新思考了如何利用镜面反射进行眼动追踪：我们提出了一种新颖的方法，可精确快速地评估注视方向，该方法借鉴了单次相位测量偏折测量法（PMD）的原理。与当前最先进的基于反射的方法相比，我们的方法仅需单次相机帧（单次拍摄）即可获取角膜和巩膜的密集三维表面信息。所获取反射表面点（“闪烁点”）的改进因子可轻松达到$>3300 \times$。我们通过实验评估证实了该方法的可行性，仅有的注视误差为$\leq 0.25^\circ$，表明相较于当前最先进技术取得了显著改进。