LookToFocus: Image Focus via Eyetracking

Sai Tedla, Scott MacKenzie, Michael Brown

ETRA COGAIN 2024

We present LookToFocus, a method to perform real-time manual camera focus based on eye tracking. LookToFocus and two alternative methods for manual focus photography tasks were compared in a user study. A novel manual focus camera simulation was used to test the methods. The first two methods were LookToFocus and LookToFocusNB (no bounding box). The third method, TapToFocus, used touch for manual focus and image capture, analogous to typical smartphone interaction. LookToFocusNB had the fastest mean capture time at 1429 ms; the mean capture times were 1431 ms for LookToFocusNB and 2416 ms for TapToFocus. When compared to TapToFocus, LookToFocus and LookToFocusNB had faster capture times because these algorithms start converging to the optimal focus as soon as the user spots the target. LookToFocus and LookToFocusNB also had no significant decrease in sharpness error compared to TapToFocus. Users preferred LookToFocus over both LookToFocusNB and TapToFocus.