Gaze Estimation Approach Using Deep Differential Residual Network
This work addresses gaze estimation for human intention understanding, showing incremental improvements in a domain-specific area.
The paper tackles gaze estimation by proposing a differential residual model (DRNet) to address calibration problems and improve accuracy using difference information from two eye images, achieving state-of-the-art angular errors of 4.57 and 6.14 on MpiiGaze and Eyediap datasets.
Gaze estimation, which is a method to determine where a person is looking at given the person's full face, is a valuable clue for understanding human intention. Similarly to other domains of computer vision, deep learning (DL) methods have gained recognition in the gaze estimation domain. However, there are still gaze calibration problems in the gaze estimation domain, thus preventing existing methods from further improving the performances. An effective solution is to directly predict the difference information of two human eyes, such as the differential network (Diff-Nn). However, this solution results in a loss of accuracy when using only one inference image. We propose a differential residual model (DRNet) combined with a new loss function to make use of the difference information of two eye images. We treat the difference information as auxiliary information. We assess the proposed model (DRNet) mainly using two public datasets (1) MpiiGaze and (2) Eyediap. Considering only the eye features, DRNet outperforms the state-of-the-art gaze estimation methods with $angular-error$ of 4.57 and 6.14 using MpiiGaze and Eyediap datasets, respectively. Furthermore, the experimental results also demonstrate that DRNet is extremely robust to noise images.