A review on visible-light eye-tracking methods based on a low-cost camera

This paper is the first of a two-part study aiming at building a low-cost visible-light eye tracker (ET) for people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The whole study comprises several phases: (1) analysis of the scientific literature, (2) selection of the studies that better fit the main goal, (3) building the ET, and (4) testing with final users. This document basically contains the two first phases, in which more than 500 studies, from different scientific databases (IEEE Xplore, Scopus, SpringerLink, etc.), fulfilled the inclusion criteria, and were analyzed following the guidelines of a scoping review. Two researchers screened the searching results and selected 44 studies (-value = 0.86, Kappa Statistic). Three main methods (appearance-, feature- or model- based) were identified for visible-light ETs, but none significantly outperformed the others according to the reported accuracy -p = 0.14, Kruskal–Wallis test (KW)-. The feature-based method is abundant in the literature, although the number of appearance-based studies is increasing due to the use of deep learning techniques. Head movements worsen the accuracy in ETs, and only a very few numbers of studies considered the use of algorithms to correct the head pose. Even though head movements seem not to be a big issue for people with ALS, some slight head movements might be enough to worsen the ET accuracy. For this reason, only studies that did not constrain the head movements with a chinrest were considered. Five studies fulfilled the selection criteria with accuracies less than $$2^{\circ }$$2 ∘ , and one of them is illuminance invariant.