A Fast and Accessible Neural Network Based Eye-Tracking System for Real-Time Psychometric and HCI Applications

Eye-tracking technology has long been a valuable tool across various domains, and recent advancements in neural networks have significantly expanded its versatility and potential. However, real-world applications continue to face challenges such as accommodating users’ natural movements, variations in lighting, occlusions of the eyes, and the limited availability of large, open-source datasets for training models. To address these issues, we developed a comprehensive pipeline that produces a lightweight and efficient model, requiring only an RGB camera as external hardware, making it easily deployable on standard PCs. Key input features include facial images, eye regions, head pose angles, the Eye Aspect Ratio (EAR), and a face grid that determines the face’s location within the camera’s frame. The model was trained using a custom dataset, in which participants were instructed to fixate on both randomly positioned points and the standard 9-point grid commonly employed in eye-tracking calibration. The resulting system was integrated into a real-time application, offering fast and accessible gaze tracking, making it well-suited for studies requiring rapid gaze assessments across broad regions of the screen, such as psychometric research and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) tasks. Its design is particularly advantageous for gaze laterality studies, which explore hemispheric dominance and attentional bias in cognitive and emotional processing, key concepts relevant to ADHD and dyslexia. Moreover, the system’s capabilities naturally extend to emotional and decision-making tasks, where broad-area gaze tracking can support the analysis of preference formation and attentional patterns without the need for specialized hardware.