Estimation of Gaze Region Using Two Dimensional Probabilistic Maps Constructed Using Convolutional Neural Networks

Predicting the gaze of a user can have important applications in human computer interactions (HCI). They find applications in areas such as social interaction, driver distraction, human robot interaction and education. Appearance based models for gaze estimation have significantly improved due to recent advances in convolutional neural network (CNN). This paper proposes a method to predict the gaze of a user with deep models purely based on CNNs. A key novelty of the proposed model is that it produces a probabilistic map describing the gaze distribution (as opposed to predicting a single gaze direction). This approach is achieved by converting the regression problem into a classification problem, predicting the probability at the output instead of a single direction. The framework relies in a sequence of downsampling followed by upsampling to obtain the probabilistic gaze map. We observe that our proposed approach works better than a regression model in terms of prediction accuracy. The average mean squared error between the predicted gaze and the true gaze is observed to be 6.89◦ in a model trained and tested on the MSP-Gaze database, without any calibration or adaptation to the target user.