# Stable Tracking of Eye Gaze Direction During Ophthalmic Surgery

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.00635 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00635/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [Appearance-based Gaze Estimation With Deep Learning: A Review and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12668/) (2021)
- [Few-Shot Adaptive Gaze Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01941/) (2019)
- [PureGaze: Purifying Gaze Feature for Generalizable Gaze Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13173/) (2021)
- [Learning to Find Eye Region Landmarks for Remote Gaze Estimation in Unconstrained Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04771/) (2018)
- [LAEO-Net: revisiting people Looking At Each Other in videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05261/) (2019)
- [RITnet: Real-time Semantic Segmentation of the Eye for Gaze Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.00694/) (2019)
- [Automatic Gaze Analysis: A Survey of Deep Learning based Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05479/) (2021)
- [Weakly-Supervised Physically Unconstrained Gaze Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09803/) (2021)
- [A Review and Analysis of Eye-Gaze Estimation Systems, Algorithms and Performance Evaluation Methods in Consumer Platforms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01817/) (2017)
- [MTGLS: Multi-Task Gaze Estimation with Limited Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.12100/) (2021)
- [CrossGaze: A Strong Method for 3D Gaze Estimation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08316/) (2024)
- [ColibriDoc: An Eye-in-Hand Autonomous Trocar Docking System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15373/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Ophthalmic surgical robots offer superior stability and precision by reducing the natural hand tremors of human surgeons, enabling delicate operations in confined surgical spaces. Despite the advancements in developing vision- and force-based control methods for surgical robots, preoperative navigation remains heavily reliant on manual operation, limiting the consistency and increasing the uncertainty. Existing eye gaze estimation techniques in the surgery, whether traditional or deep learning-based, face challenges including dependence on additional sensors, occlusion issues in surgical environments, and the requirement for facial detection. To address these limitations, this study proposes an innovative eye localization and tracking method that combines machine learning with traditional algorithms, eliminating the requirements of landmarks and maintaining stable iris detection and gaze estimation under varying lighting and shadow conditions. Extensive real-world experiment results show that our proposed method has an average estimation error of 0.58 degrees for eye orientation estimation and 2.08-degree average control error for the robotic arm's movement based on the calculated orientation.