'Labelling the Gaps': A Weakly Supervised Automatic Eye Gaze Estimation

Abstract: Over the past few years, there has been an increasing interest to interpret gaze direction in an unconstrained environment with limited supervision. Owing to data curation and annotation issues, replicating gaze estimation method to other platforms, such as unconstrained outdoor or AR/VR, might lead to significant drop in performance due to insufficient availability of accurately annotated data for model training. In this paper, we explore an interesting yet challenging problem of gaze estimation method with a limited amount of labelled data. The proposed method distills knowledge from the labelled subset with visual features; including identity-specific appearance, gaze trajectory consistency and motion features. Given a gaze trajectory, the method utilizes label information of only the start and the end frames of a gaze sequence. An extension of the proposed method further reduces the requirement of labelled frames to only the start frame with a minor drop in the generated label's quality. We evaluate the proposed method on four benchmark datasets (CAVE, TabletGaze, MPII and Gaze360) as well as web-crawled YouTube videos. Our proposed method reduces the annotation effort to as low as 2.67%, with minimal impact on performance; indicating the potential of our model enabling gaze estimation 'in-the-wild' setup.