EyeTheia: A Lightweight and Accessible Eye-Tracking Toolbox
This provides an incremental, transparent solution for scalable and reproducible cognitive and clinical research using standard hardware.
The authors tackled the problem of low-cost, accessible gaze estimation by introducing EyeTheia, a lightweight deep learning pipeline for webcam-based gaze tracking, achieving comparable performance to commercial tools like SeeSo SDK in tasks such as the Dot-Probe task with strong agreement in left-right gaze allocation.
We introduce EyeTheia, a lightweight and open deep learning pipeline for webcam-based gaze estimation, designed for browser-based experimental platforms and real-world cognitive and clinical research. EyeTheia enables real-time gaze tracking using only a standard laptop webcam, combining MediaPipe-based landmark extraction with a convolutional neural network inspired by iTracker and optional user-specific fine-tuning. We investigate two complementary strategies: adapting a model pretrained on mobile data and training the same architecture from scratch on a desktop-oriented dataset. Validation results on MPIIFaceGaze show comparable performance between both approaches prior to calibration, while lightweight user-specific fine-tuning consistently reduces gaze prediction error. We further evaluate EyeTheia in a realistic Dot-Probe task and compare it to the commercial webcam-based tracker SeeSo SDK. Results indicate strong agreement in left-right gaze allocation during stimulus presentation, despite higher temporal variability. Overall, EyeTheia provides a transparent and extensible solution for low-cost gaze tracking, suitable for scalable and reproducible experimental and clinical studies. The code, trained models, and experimental materials are publicly available.