Exploring Temporal Dynamics in Event-based Eye Tracker

Abstract: Eye-tracking is a vital technology for human-computer interaction, especially in wearable devices such as AR, VR, and XR. The realization of high-speed and high-precision eye-tracking using frame-based image sensors is constrained by their limited temporal resolution, which impairs the accurate capture of rapid ocular dynamics, such as saccades and blinks. Event cameras, inspired by biological vision systems, are capable of perceiving eye movements with extremely low power consumption and ultra-high temporal resolution. This makes them a promising solution for achieving high-speed, high-precision tracking with rich temporal dynamics. In this paper, we propose TDTracker, an effective eye-tracking framework that captures rapid eye movements by thoroughly modeling temporal dynamics from both implicit and explicit perspectives. TDTracker utilizes 3D convolutional neural networks to capture implicit short-term temporal dynamics and employs a cascaded structure consisting of a Frequency-aware Module, GRU, and Mamba to extract explicit long-term temporal dynamics. Ultimately, a prediction heatmap is used for eye coordinate regression. Experimental results demonstrate that TDTracker achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the synthetic SEET dataset and secured Third place in the CVPR event-based eye-tracking challenge 2025. Our code is available at https://github.com/rhwxmx/TDTracker.