Art facing science: Artistic heuristics for face detection: tracking gaze when looking at faces

Automatic Area Of Interest (AOI) demarcation of facial regions is not yet commonplace in applied eye-tracking research, partially because automatic AOI labeling is prone to error. Most previous eye-tracking studies relied on manual frame-by-frame labeling of facial AOIs. We present a fully automatic approach for facial AOI labeling (i.e., eyes, nose, mouth) and gaze registration within those AOIs, based on modern computer vision techniques combined with heuristics drawn from art. We discuss details in computing gaze analytics, provide proof-of-concept, and a short validation against what we consider ground truth. Relative dwell time over expected AOIs exceeded 98% showing efficacy of the approach.