Polarization-Based Eye Tracking with Personalized Siamese Architectures

arXiv cs.CV / 3/30/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper addresses a key limitation of head-mounted eye tracking: users typically need per-person calibration due to inter-person gaze variability.
  • It proposes a differential personalization method using Siamese architectures to learn relative gaze displacements and then reconstruct absolute gaze from only a small calibration set.
  • Benchmarking is done on a large 338-subject dataset using a polarization-sensitive camera and 850 nm illumination, evaluating how Siamese personalization performs versus linear calibration.
  • Results show that Siamese personalization can match linear calibration accuracy while using 10× fewer calibration samples, improving gaze error by up to 12% when using polarization inputs compared with NIR inputs.
  • The study further finds that combining Siamese personalization with linear calibration can improve performance by up to 13% over a linearly calibrated baseline, supporting Siamese personalization as a practical approach for accurate eye tracking.

Abstract

Head-mounted devices integrated with eye tracking promise a solution for natural human-computer interaction. However, they typically require per-user calibration for optimal performance due to inter-person variability. A differential personalization approach using Siamese architectures learns relative gaze displacements and reconstructs absolute gaze from a small set of calibration frames. In this paper, we benchmark Siamese personalization on polarization-enabled eye tracking. For benchmarking, we use a 338-subject dataset captured with a polarization-sensitive camera and 850 nm illumination. We achieve performance comparable to linear calibration with 10-fold fewer samples. Using polarization inputs for Siamese personalization reduces gaze error by up to 12% compared to near-infrared (NIR)-based inputs. Combining Siamese personalization with linear calibration yields further improvements of up to 13% over a linearly calibrated baseline. These results establish Siamese personalization as a practical approach enabling accurate eye tracking.