4,459 research outputs found
A Differential Approach for Gaze Estimation
Non-invasive gaze estimation methods usually regress gaze directions directly
from a single face or eye image. However, due to important variabilities in eye
shapes and inner eye structures amongst individuals, universal models obtain
limited accuracies and their output usually exhibit high variance as well as
biases which are subject dependent. Therefore, increasing accuracy is usually
done through calibration, allowing gaze predictions for a subject to be mapped
to his/her actual gaze. In this paper, we introduce a novel image differential
method for gaze estimation. We propose to directly train a differential
convolutional neural network to predict the gaze differences between two eye
input images of the same subject. Then, given a set of subject specific
calibration images, we can use the inferred differences to predict the gaze
direction of a novel eye sample. The assumption is that by allowing the
comparison between two eye images, annoyance factors (alignment, eyelid
closing, illumination perturbations) which usually plague single image
prediction methods can be much reduced, allowing better prediction altogether.
Experiments on 3 public datasets validate our approach which constantly
outperforms state-of-the-art methods even when using only one calibration
sample or when the latter methods are followed by subject specific gaze
adaptation.Comment: Extension to our paper A differential approach for gaze estimation
with calibration (BMVC 2018) Submitted to PAMI on Aug. 7th, 2018 Accepted by
PAMI short on Dec. 2019, in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine
Intelligenc
Learning to Personalize in Appearance-Based Gaze Tracking
Personal variations severely limit the performance of appearance-based gaze
tracking. Adapting to these variations using standard neural network model
adaptation methods is difficult. The problems range from overfitting, due to
small amounts of training data, to underfitting, due to restrictive model
architectures. We tackle these problems by introducing the SPatial Adaptive
GaZe Estimator (SPAZE). By modeling personal variations as a low-dimensional
latent parameter space, SPAZE provides just enough adaptability to capture the
range of personal variations without being prone to overfitting. Calibrating
SPAZE for a new person reduces to solving a small optimization problem. SPAZE
achieves an error of 2.70 degrees with 9 calibration samples on MPIIGaze,
improving on the state-of-the-art by 14 %. We contribute to gaze tracking
research by empirically showing that personal variations are well-modeled as a
3-dimensional latent parameter space for each eye. We show that this
low-dimensionality is expected by examining model-based approaches to gaze
tracking. We also show that accurate head pose-free gaze tracking is possible
Fast and Accurate Algorithm for Eye Localization for Gaze Tracking in Low Resolution Images
Iris centre localization in low-resolution visible images is a challenging
problem in computer vision community due to noise, shadows, occlusions, pose
variations, eye blinks, etc. This paper proposes an efficient method for
determining iris centre in low-resolution images in the visible spectrum. Even
low-cost consumer-grade webcams can be used for gaze tracking without any
additional hardware. A two-stage algorithm is proposed for iris centre
localization. The proposed method uses geometrical characteristics of the eye.
In the first stage, a fast convolution based approach is used for obtaining the
coarse location of iris centre (IC). The IC location is further refined in the
second stage using boundary tracing and ellipse fitting. The algorithm has been
evaluated in public databases like BioID, Gi4E and is found to outperform the
state of the art methods.Comment: 12 pages, 10 figures, IET Computer Vision, 201
Putting culture under the spotlight reveals universal information use for face recognition
Background: Eye movement strategies employed by humans to identify conspecifics are not universal. Westerners predominantly fixate the eyes during face recognition, whereas Easterners more the nose region, yet recognition accuracy is comparable. However, natural fixations do not unequivocally represent information extraction. So the question of whether humans universally use identical facial information to recognize faces remains unresolved. Methodology/Principal Findings: We monitored eye movements during face recognition of Western Caucasian (WC) and East Asian (EA) observers with a novel technique in face recognition that parametrically restricts information outside central vision. We used ‘Spotlights’ with Gaussian apertures of 2°, 5° or 8° dynamically centered on observers’ fixations. Strikingly, in constrained Spotlight conditions (2°, 5°) observers of both cultures actively fixated the same facial information: the eyes and mouth. When information from both eyes and mouth was simultaneously available when fixating the nose (8°), as expected EA observers shifted their fixations towards this region. Conclusions/Significance: Social experience and cultural factors shape the strategies used to extract information from faces, but these results suggest that external forces do not modulate information use. Human beings rely on identical facial information to recognize conspecifics, a universal law that might be dictated by the evolutionary constraints of nature and not nurture
I2DNet - Design and real-time evaluation of an appearance-based gaze estimation system
Gaze estimation problem can be addressed using either model-based or appearance-based approaches. Model-based approaches rely on features extracted from eye images to fit a 3D eye-ball model to obtain gaze point estimate while appearance-based methods attempt to directly map captured eye images to gaze point without any handcrafted features. Recently, availability of large datasets and novel deep learning techniques made appearance-based methods achieve superior accuracy than model-based approaches. However, many appearance-based gaze estimation systems perform well in within-dataset validation but fail to provide the same degree of accuracy in cross-dataset evaluation. Hence, it is still unclear how well the current state-of-the-art approaches perform in real-time in an interactive setting on unseen users. This paper proposes I2DNet, a novel architecture aimed to improve subject-independent gaze estimation accuracy that achieved a state-of-the-art 4.3 and 8.4 degree mean angle error on the MPIIGaze and RT-Gene datasets respectively. We have evaluated the proposed system as a gaze-controlled interface in real-time for a 9-block pointing and selection task and compared it with Webgazer.js and OpenFace 2.0. We have conducted a user study with 16 participants, and our proposed system reduces selection time and the number of missed selections statistically significantly compared to other two systems
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