Semi-supervised Contrastive Regression for Estimation of Eye Gaze

With the escalated demand of human-machine interfaces for intelligent systems, development of gaze controlled system have become a necessity. Gaze, being the non-intrusive form of human interaction, is one of the best suited approach. Appearance based deep learning models are the most widely used for gaze estimation. But the performance of these models is entirely influenced by the size of labeled gaze dataset and in effect affects generalization in performance. This paper aims to develop a semi-supervised contrastive learning framework for estimation of gaze direction. With a small labeled gaze dataset, the framework is able to find a generalized solution even for unseen face images. In this paper, we have proposed a new contrastive loss paradigm that maximizes the similarity agreement between similar images and at the same time reduces the redundancy in embedding representations. Our contrastive regression framework shows good performance in comparison to several state of the art contrastive learning techniques used for gaze estimation.

LocalEyenet: Deep Attention framework for Localization of Eyes

Development of human machine interface has become a necessity for modern day machines to catalyze more autonomy and more efficiency. Gaze driven human intervention is an effective and convenient option for creating an interface to alleviate human errors. Facial landmark detection is very crucial for designing a robust gaze detection system. Regression based methods capacitate good spatial localization of the landmarks corresponding to different parts of the faces. But there are still scope of improvements which have been addressed by incorporating attention. In this paper, we have proposed a deep coarse-to-fine architecture called LocalEyenet for localization of only the eye regions that can be trained end-to-end. The model architecture, build on stacked hourglass backbone, learns the self-attention in feature maps which aids in preserving global as well as local spatial dependencies in face image. We have incorporated deep layer aggregation in each hourglass to minimize the loss of attention over the depth of architecture. Our model shows good generalization ability in cross-dataset evaluation and in real-time localization of eyes.