Dynamic 3D Gaze From Afar: Deep Gaze Estimation From Temporal Eye-Head-Body Coordination

Soma Nonaka, Shohei Nobuhara, Ko Nishino; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022, pp. 2192-2201

We introduce a novel method and dataset for 3D gaze estimation of a freely moving person from a distance, typically in surveillance views. Eyes cannot be clearly seen in such cases due to occlusion and lacking resolution. Existing gaze estimation methods suffer or fall back to approximating gaze with head pose as they primarily rely on clear, close-up views of the eyes. Our key idea is to instead leverage the intrinsic gaze, head, and body coordination of people. Our method formulates gaze estimation as Bayesian prediction given temporal estimates of head and body orientations which can be reliably estimated from a far. We model the head and body orientation likelihoods and the conditional prior of gaze direction on those with separate neural networks which are then cascaded to output the 3D gaze direction. We introduce an extensive new dataset that consists of surveillance videos annotated with 3D gaze directions captured in 5 indoor and outdoor scenes. Experimental results on this and other datasets validate the accuracy of our method and demonstrate that gaze can be accurately estimated from a typical surveillance distance even when the person's face is not visible to the camera.