Gaze locking: passive eye contact detection for human-object interaction

Eye contact plays a crucial role in our everyday social interactions. The ability of a device to reliably detect when a person is looking at it can lead to powerful human-object interfaces. Today, most gaze-based interactive systems rely on gaze tracking technology. Unfortunately, current gaze tracking techniques require active infrared illumination, calibration, or are sensitive to distance and pose. In this work, we propose a different solution-a passive, appearance-based approach for sensing eye contact in an image. By focusing on gaze *locking* rather than gaze tracking, we exploit the special appearance of direct eye gaze, achieving a Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) of over 0.83 at long distances (up to 18 m) and large pose variations (up to ±30° of head yaw rotation) using a very basic classifier and without calibration. To train our detector, we also created a large publicly available gaze data set: 5,880 images of 56 people over varying gaze directions and head poses. We demonstrate how our method facilitates human-object interaction, user analytics, image filtering, and gaze-triggered photography.