PureGaze: Purifying Gaze Feature for Generalizable Gaze Estimation

TL;DR

PureGaze introduces a novel domain generalization approach for gaze estimation by purifying gaze features to remove irrelevant factors, significantly enhancing cross-domain performance without using target domain data.

Contribution

The paper proposes the first domain generalization method for gaze estimation using gaze feature purification via a self-adversarial framework.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art results among typical gaze estimation methods.

Provides competitive performance compared to domain adaptation methods.

Enhances existing gaze estimation methods through plug-and-play framework.

Abstract

Gaze estimation methods learn eye gaze from facial features. However, among rich information in the facial image, real gaze-relevant features only correspond to subtle changes in eye region, while other gaze-irrelevant features like illumination, personal appearance and even facial expression may affect the learning in an unexpected way. This is a major reason why existing methods show significant performance degradation in cross-domain/dataset evaluation. In this paper, we tackle the cross-domain problem in gaze estimation. Different from common domain adaption methods, we propose a domain generalization method to improve the cross-domain performance without touching target samples. The domain generalization is realized by gaze feature purification. We eliminate gaze-irrelevant factors such as illumination and identity to improve the cross-domain performance. We design a plug-and-play self-adversarial framework for the gaze feature purification. The framework enhances not only our baseline but also existing gaze estimation methods directly and significantly. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose domain generalization methods in gaze estimation. Our method achieves not only state-of-the-art performance among typical gaze estimation methods but also competitive results among domain adaption methods. The code is released in https://github.com/yihuacheng/PureGaze.