Rotational Motion-Induced Error Compensation for Phase-Shifting Profilometry-Based Eye Reconstruction
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Summary
The authors studied how to improve 3D eye tracking in virtual reality headsets, where the eye moves quickly between camera frames. They found that a common method called Phase-Shifting Profilometry (PSP) struggles with errors when the eye rotates during image capture. To fix this, they created a system that estimates the eye's rotation using a 3D eye model and then corrects the image errors caused by this movement. Testing on fake eyes and other objects showed their method greatly reduces motion errors, making eye tracking more accurate and reliable.
Authors
Seong-Jin An, Sanghoon Jeon, Yatong An, Jae-Sang Hyun
Abstract
With the proliferation of immersive Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs) for Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR), reliable and high-precision eye tracking has become increasingly important. Conventional 2D image-based methods offer low system complexity but remain limited in stability, accuracy, and robustness. Three-dimensional ocular surface reconstruction can provide richer geomet-ric information, and structured light profilometry is particularly attractive because it enables dense and accurate surface measurement. However, Phase-Shifting Profilometry (PSP), which estimates phase from sequentially acquired fringe images, is highly susceptible to motion-induced errors when the eye rotates between frames. This study proposes a rotational motion compensation framework for PSP-based dynamic 3D eye reconstruction. Relative eye rotation is estimated from image-based motion cues using a user-specific 3D eye model in a spherical-coordinate domain. The estimated motion is then used to compensate for camera-pixel mismatch and phase-shift errors caused by inter-frame rotation. A region-wise optimization strategy is further introduced to reduce residual artifacts by inde-pendently refining the compensation strength in different ocular regions. Experiments with a rotating fake eye under non-uniform motion demonstrate that the proposed method substantially suppresses motion-induced deformation and improves reconstruction accuracy. An additional experiment with a non-spherical rigid object indicates that the compensation principle is not restricted to spherical eye geometry. These results establish a practical basis for stable PSP-based dynamic 3D eye reconstruction toward future high-precision eye tracking in immersive environments.