Appearance-based gaze estimation is believed to work well in real-world settings, but existing datasets have been collected under controlled laboratory conditions and methods have been not evaluated across multiple datasets. In this work we study appearance-based gaze estimation in the wild. We present the MPIIGaze dataset that contains 213,659 images we collected from 15 participants during natural everyday laptop use over more than three months. Our dataset is significantly more variable than existing ones with respect to appearance and illumination. We also present a method for in-the-wild appearance-based gaze estimation using multimodal convolutional neural networks that significantly outperforms state-of-the art methods in the most challenging cross-dataset evaluation. We present an extensive evaluation of several state-of-the-art image-based gaze estimation algorithms on three current datasets, including our own. This evaluation provides clear insights and allows us to identify key research challenges of gaze estimation in the wild.
Purely data-driven approaches leverage large amounts of training data to learn gaze estimators that generalise to arbitrary users without the need for person-specific calibration @cite_49 @cite_51 @cite_25 settings. These methods have significant potential to bring gaze estimation to new settings, including mobile devices, public displays, and egocentric cameras. However, the generalization capability of learning-based methods has not been examined yet. Moreover, prior work used 3D input for head pose information @cite_51 @cite_25 , while we are the first to evaluate the whole pipeline for fully automatic monocular appearance-based gaze estimation for person-independent training scenario.
@cite_51 @cite_25 @cite_49
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Inferring human gaze from low-resolution eye images is still a challenging task despite its practical importance in many application scenarios. This paper presents a learning-by-synthesis approach to accurate image-based gaze estimation that is person- and head pose-independent. Unlike existing appearance-based methods that assume person-specific training data, we use a large amount of cross-subject training data to train a 3D gaze estimator. We collect the largest and fully calibrated multi-view gaze dataset and perform a 3D reconstruction in order to generate dense training data of eye images. By using the synthesized dataset to learn a random regression forest, we show that our method outperforms existing methods that use low-resolution eye images. Appearance-based gaze estimation is promising for unconstrained real-world settings, but the significant variability in head pose and user-camera distance poses significant challenges for training generic gaze estimators. Data normalization was proposed to cancel out this geometric variability by mapping input images and gaze labels to a normalized space. Although used successfully in prior works, the role and importance of data normalization remains unclear. To fill this gap, we study data normalization for the first time using principled evaluations on both simulated and real data. We propose a modification to the current data normalization formulation by removing the scaling factor and show that our new formulation performs significantly better (between 9.5 and 32.7 ) in the different evaluation settings. Using images synthesized from a 3D face model, we demonstrate the benefit of data normalization for the efficiency of the model training. Experiments on real-world images confirm the advantages of data normalization in terms of gaze estimation performance. Learning-based methods are believed to work well for unconstrained gaze estimation, i.e. gaze estimation from a monocular RGB camera without assumptions regarding user, environment, or camera. However, current gaze datasets were collected under laboratory conditions and methods were not evaluated across multiple datasets. Our work makes three contributions towards addressing these limitations. First, we present the MPIIGaze that contains 213,659 full face images and corresponding ground-truth gaze positions collected from 15 users during everyday laptop use over several months. An experience sampling approach ensured continuous gaze and head poses and realistic variation in eye appearance and illumination. To facilitate cross-dataset evaluations, 37,667 images were manually annotated with eye corners, mouth corners, and pupil centres. Second, we present an extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art gaze estimation methods on three current datasets, including MPIIGaze. We study key challenges including target gaze range, illumination conditions, and facial appearance variation. We show that image resolution and the use of both eyes affect gaze estimation performance while head pose and pupil centre information are less informative. Finally, we propose GazeNet, the first deep appearance-based gaze estimation method. GazeNet improves the state of the art by 22 percent (from a mean error of 13.9 degrees to 10.8 degrees) for the most challenging cross-dataset evaluation. Learning-based methods are believed to work well for unconstrained gaze estimation, i.e. gaze estimation from a monocular RGB camera without assumptions regarding user, environment, or camera. However, current gaze datasets were collected under laboratory conditions and methods were not evaluated across multiple datasets. Our work makes three contributions towards addressing these limitations. First, we present the MPIIGaze dataset, which contains 213,659 full face images and corresponding ground-truth gaze positions collected from 15 users during everyday laptop use over several months. An experience sampling approach ensured continuous gaze and head poses and realistic variation in eye appearance and illumination. To facilitate cross-dataset evaluations, 37,667 images were manually annotated with eye corners, mouth corners, and pupil centres. Second, we present an extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art gaze estimation methods on three current datasets, including MPIIGaze. We study key challenges including target gaze range, illumination conditions, and facial appearance variation. We show that image resolution and the use of both eyes affect gaze estimation performance, while head pose and pupil centre information are less informative. Finally, we propose GazeNet, the first deep appearance-based gaze estimation method. GazeNet improves on the state of the art by 22 percent (from a mean error of 13.9 degrees to 10.8 degrees) for the most challenging cross-dataset evaluation.