JaneEye: A 12-nm 2K-FPS 18.9-$μ$J/Frame Event-based Eye Tracking Accelerator

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Han, Tao, Li, Ang, Chen, Qinyu, Gao, Chang
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Han, Tao
Li, Ang
Chen, Qinyu
Gao, Chang
author_facet Han, Tao
Li, Ang
Chen, Qinyu
Gao, Chang
contents Eye tracking has become a key technology for gaze-based interactions in Extended Reality (XR). However, conventional frame-based eye-tracking systems often fall short of XR's stringent requirements for high accuracy, low latency, and energy efficiency. Event cameras present a compelling alternative, offering ultra-high temporal resolution and low power consumption. In this paper, we present JaneEye, an energy-efficient event-based eye-tracking hardware accelerator designed specifically for wearable devices, leveraging sparse, high-temporal-resolution event data. We introduce an ultra-lightweight neural network architecture featuring a novel ConvJANET layer, which simplifies the traditional ConvLSTM by retaining only the forget gate, thereby halving computational complexity without sacrificing temporal modeling capability. Our proposed model achieves high accuracy with a pixel error of 2.45 on the 3ET+ dataset, using only 17.6K parameters, with up to 1250 Hz event frame rate. To further enhance hardware efficiency, we employ custom linear approximations of activation functions (hardsigmoid and hardtanh) and fixed-point quantization. Through software-hardware co-design, our 12-nm ASIC implementation operates at 400 MHz, delivering an end-to-end latency of 0.5 ms (equivalent to 2000 Frames Per Second (FPS)) at an energy efficiency of 18.9 $μ$J/frame. JaneEye sets a new benchmark in low-power, high-performance eye-tracking solutions suitable for integration into next-generation XR wearables.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_01213
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle JaneEye: A 12-nm 2K-FPS 18.9-$μ$J/Frame Event-based Eye Tracking Accelerator
Han, Tao
Li, Ang
Chen, Qinyu
Gao, Chang
Signal Processing
Hardware Architecture
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Human-Computer Interaction
Image and Video Processing
Eye tracking has become a key technology for gaze-based interactions in Extended Reality (XR). However, conventional frame-based eye-tracking systems often fall short of XR's stringent requirements for high accuracy, low latency, and energy efficiency. Event cameras present a compelling alternative, offering ultra-high temporal resolution and low power consumption. In this paper, we present JaneEye, an energy-efficient event-based eye-tracking hardware accelerator designed specifically for wearable devices, leveraging sparse, high-temporal-resolution event data. We introduce an ultra-lightweight neural network architecture featuring a novel ConvJANET layer, which simplifies the traditional ConvLSTM by retaining only the forget gate, thereby halving computational complexity without sacrificing temporal modeling capability. Our proposed model achieves high accuracy with a pixel error of 2.45 on the 3ET+ dataset, using only 17.6K parameters, with up to 1250 Hz event frame rate. To further enhance hardware efficiency, we employ custom linear approximations of activation functions (hardsigmoid and hardtanh) and fixed-point quantization. Through software-hardware co-design, our 12-nm ASIC implementation operates at 400 MHz, delivering an end-to-end latency of 0.5 ms (equivalent to 2000 Frames Per Second (FPS)) at an energy efficiency of 18.9 $μ$J/frame. JaneEye sets a new benchmark in low-power, high-performance eye-tracking solutions suitable for integration into next-generation XR wearables.
title JaneEye: A 12-nm 2K-FPS 18.9-$μ$J/Frame Event-based Eye Tracking Accelerator
topic Signal Processing
Hardware Architecture
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Human-Computer Interaction
Image and Video Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01213