NITEC

This paper introduces NITEC, a new dataset and models for detecting eye contact from an ego-centric camera perspective. The models are trained and tested on this dataset, demonstrating strong performance and cross-dataset generalization ability. NITEC contains over 35,000 manually annotated samples from diverse sources, capturing challenging real-world conditions. Extensive experiments highlight NITEC's ability to enable training of accurate eye contact classifiers, advancing research in social human-robot interaction.