Appearance-Based Gaze Estimation Using Attention and Difference Mechanism

Murthy L R D, Pradipta Biswas; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops, 2021, pp. 3143-3152

Appearance-based gaze estimation problem received wide attention over the past few years. Even though model-based approaches existed earlier, availability of large datasets and novel deep learning techniques made appearance-based methods achieve superior accuracy than model-based approaches. In this paper, we proposed two novel techniques to improve gaze estimation accuracy. Our first approach, I2D-Net uses a difference layer to eliminate any common features from left and right eyes of a subject that are not pertinent to gaze estimation task. Our second approach, AGE-Net adapted the idea of attentionmechanism and assigns weights to the features extracted from eye images. I2D-Net performed on par with the existing state-of-the-art approaches while AGE-Net reported state-of-the-art accuracy of 4.09 and 7.44 degree error on MPIIGaze and RT-Gene datasets respectively. We performed ablation studies to understand the effectiveness of the proposed approaches followed by analysis of gaze error distribution with respect to various factors of MPIIGaze dataset.