GazeOnce: Real-Time Multi-Person Gaze Estimation

Mingfang Zhang, Yunfei Liu, Feng Lu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022, pp. 4197-4206

Appearance-based gaze estimation aims to predict the 3D eye gaze direction from a single image. While recent deep learning-based approaches have demonstrated excellent performance, they usually assume one calibrated face in each input image and cannot output multi-person gaze in real time. However, simultaneous gaze estimation for multiple people in the wild is necessary for real-world applications. In this paper, we propose the first one-stage end-to-end gaze estimation method, GazeOnce, which is capable of simultaneously predicting gaze directions for multiple faces (>10) in an image. In addition, we design a sophisticated data generation pipeline and propose a new dataset, MPSGaze, which contains full images of multiple people with 3D gaze ground truth. Experimental results demonstrate that our unified framework not only offers a faster speed, but also provides a lower gaze estimation error compared with state-of-the-art methods. This technique can be useful in real-time applications with multiple users.