Inference-Time Gaze Refinement for Micro-Expression Recognition: Enhancing Event-Based Eye Tracking with Motion-Aware Post-Processing

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Bandara, Nuwan, Kandappu, Thivya, Misra, Archan
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Bandara, Nuwan
Kandappu, Thivya
Misra, Archan
author_facet Bandara, Nuwan
Kandappu, Thivya
Misra, Archan
contents Event-based eye tracking holds significant promise for fine-grained cognitive state inference, offering high temporal resolution and robustness to motion artifacts, critical features for decoding subtle mental states such as attention, confusion, or fatigue. In this work, we introduce a model-agnostic, inference-time refinement framework designed to enhance the output of existing event-based gaze estimation models without modifying their architecture or requiring retraining. Our method comprises two key post-processing modules: (i) Motion-Aware Median Filtering, which suppresses blink-induced spikes while preserving natural gaze dynamics, and (ii) Optical Flow-Based Local Refinement, which aligns gaze predictions with cumulative event motion to reduce spatial jitter and temporal discontinuities. To complement traditional spatial accuracy metrics, we propose a novel Jitter Metric that captures the temporal smoothness of predicted gaze trajectories based on velocity regularity and local signal complexity. Together, these contributions significantly improve the consistency of event-based gaze signals, making them better suited for downstream tasks such as micro-expression analysis and mind-state decoding. Our results demonstrate consistent improvements across multiple baseline models on controlled datasets, laying the groundwork for future integration with multimodal affect recognition systems in real-world environments. Our code implementations can be found at https://github.com/eye-tracking-for-physiological-sensing/EyeLoRiN.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_12524
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Inference-Time Gaze Refinement for Micro-Expression Recognition: Enhancing Event-Based Eye Tracking with Motion-Aware Post-Processing
Bandara, Nuwan
Kandappu, Thivya
Misra, Archan
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Human-Computer Interaction
Machine Learning
Image and Video Processing
Event-based eye tracking holds significant promise for fine-grained cognitive state inference, offering high temporal resolution and robustness to motion artifacts, critical features for decoding subtle mental states such as attention, confusion, or fatigue. In this work, we introduce a model-agnostic, inference-time refinement framework designed to enhance the output of existing event-based gaze estimation models without modifying their architecture or requiring retraining. Our method comprises two key post-processing modules: (i) Motion-Aware Median Filtering, which suppresses blink-induced spikes while preserving natural gaze dynamics, and (ii) Optical Flow-Based Local Refinement, which aligns gaze predictions with cumulative event motion to reduce spatial jitter and temporal discontinuities. To complement traditional spatial accuracy metrics, we propose a novel Jitter Metric that captures the temporal smoothness of predicted gaze trajectories based on velocity regularity and local signal complexity. Together, these contributions significantly improve the consistency of event-based gaze signals, making them better suited for downstream tasks such as micro-expression analysis and mind-state decoding. Our results demonstrate consistent improvements across multiple baseline models on controlled datasets, laying the groundwork for future integration with multimodal affect recognition systems in real-world environments. Our code implementations can be found at https://github.com/eye-tracking-for-physiological-sensing/EyeLoRiN.
title Inference-Time Gaze Refinement for Micro-Expression Recognition: Enhancing Event-Based Eye Tracking with Motion-Aware Post-Processing
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Human-Computer Interaction
Machine Learning
Image and Video Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12524