Merging Multiple Datasets for Improved Appearance-Based Gaze Estimation
摘要
Multiple datasets have been created for training and testing appearance-based gaze estimators. Intuitively, more data should lead to better performance. However, combining datasets to train a single estimator rarely improves gaze estimation performance. One reason may be differences in the experimental protocols used to obtain the gaze samples, resulting in differences in the distributions of head poses, gaze angles, illumination, etc. Another reason may be the inconsistency between methods used to define gaze angles (label mismatch). We propose two innovations to improve the performance of gaze estimation by leveraging multiple datasets, a change in the estimator architecture and the introduction of a gaze adaptation module. Most state-of-the-art estimators merge information extracted from images of the two eyes and the entire face either in parallel or combine information from the eyes first then with the face. Our proposed Two-stage Transformer-based Gaze-feature Fusion (TTGF) method uses transformers to merge information from each eye and the face separately and then merge across the two eyes. We argue that this improves head pose invariance since changes in head pose affect left and right eye images in different ways. Our proposed Gaze Adaptation Module (GAM) method handles annotation inconsistency by applying a Gaze Adaption Module for each dataset to correct gaze estimates from a single shared estimator. This enables us to combine information across datasets despite differences in labeling. Our experiments show that these innovations improve gaze estimation performance over the SOTA both individually and collectively (by 10%–20%). Our code is available at https://github.com/HKUST-NISL/GazeSetMerge .