Unsupervised Gaze Representation Learning from Multi-view Face Images

Yiwei Bao, Feng Lu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 1419-1428

Annotating gaze is an expensive and time-consuming endeavor requiring costly eye-trackers or complex geometric calibration procedures. Although some eye-based unsupervised gaze representation learning methods have been proposed the quality of gaze representation extracted by these methods degrades severely when the head pose is large. In this paper we present the Multi-View Dual-Encoder (MV-DE) a framework designed to learn gaze representations from unlabeled multi-view face images. Through the proposed Dual-Encoder architecture and the multi-view gaze representation swapping strategy the MV-DE successfully disentangles gaze from general facial information and derives gaze representations closely tied to the subject's eyeball rotation without gaze label. Experimental results illustrate that the gaze representations learned by the MV-DE can be used in downstream tasks including gaze estimation and redirection. Gaze estimation results indicates that the proposed MV-DE displays notably higher robustness to uncontrolled head movements when compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) unsupervised learning methods.