Gaze Estimation for Assisted Living Environments
This work addresses the problem of monitoring interactions in assisted living for elderly or disabled individuals, but it is incremental as it builds on existing pose estimation methods.
The paper tackles gaze estimation in assisted living environments by proposing a neural network regressor that uses facial keypoints and a confidence gated unit to handle occlusion, achieving performance comparable to a complex baseline and providing uncertainty predictions correlated with error.
Effective assisted living environments must be able to perform inferences on how their occupants interact with one another as well as with surrounding objects. To accomplish this goal using a vision-based automated approach, multiple tasks such as pose estimation, object segmentation and gaze estimation must be addressed. Gaze direction in particular provides some of the strongest indications of how a person interacts with the environment. In this paper, we propose a simple neural network regressor that estimates the gaze direction of individuals in a multi-camera assisted living scenario, relying only on the relative positions of facial keypoints collected from a single pose estimation model. To handle cases of keypoint occlusion, our model exploits a novel confidence gated unit in its input layer. In addition to the gaze direction, our model also outputs an estimation of its own prediction uncertainty. Experimental results on a public benchmark demonstrate that our approach performs on pair with a complex, dataset-specific baseline, while its uncertainty predictions are highly correlated to the actual angular error of corresponding estimations. Finally, experiments on images from a real assisted living environment demonstrate the higher suitability of our model for its final application.