PureGaze: Purifying Gaze Feature for Generalizable Gaze Estimation

Authors

  • Yihua Cheng Beihang University
  • Yiwei Bao Beihang University
  • Feng Lu Beihang University Peng Cheng Laboratory

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v36i1.19921

Keywords:

Computer Vision (CV)

Abstract

Gaze estimation methods learn eye gaze from facial features. However, among rich information in the facial image, real gaze-relevant features only correspond to subtle changes in eye region, while other gaze-irrelevant features like illumination, personal appearance and even facial expression may affect the learning in an unexpected way. This is a major reason why existing methods show significant performance degradation in cross-domain/dataset evaluation. In this paper, we tackle the cross-domain problem in gaze estimation. Different from common domain adaption methods, we propose a domain generalization method to improve the cross-domain performance without touching target samples. The domain generalization is realized by gaze feature purification. We eliminate gaze-irrelevant factors such as illumination and identity to improve the cross-domain performance. We design a plug-and-play self-adversarial framework for the gaze feature purification. The framework enhances not only our baseline but also existing gaze estimation methods directly and significantly. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose domain generalization methods in gaze estimation. Our method achieves not only state-of-the-art performance among typical gaze estimation methods but also competitive results among domain adaption methods. The code is released in https://github.com/yihuacheng/PureGaze.

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Published

2022-06-28

How to Cite

Cheng, Y., Bao, Y., & Lu, F. (2022). PureGaze: Purifying Gaze Feature for Generalizable Gaze Estimation. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 36(1), 436-443. https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v36i1.19921

Issue

Section

AAAI Technical Track on Computer Vision I