Understanding where people are looking is an informative social cue. In this work, we present Gaze360, a large-scale gaze-tracking dataset and method for robust 3D gaze estimation in unconstrained images. Our dataset consists of 238 subjects in indoor and outdoor environments with labelled 3D gaze across a wide range of head poses and distances. It is the largest publicly available dataset of its kind by both subject and variety, made possible by a simple and efficient collection method. Our proposed 3D gaze model extends existing models to include temporal information and to directly output an estimate of gaze uncertainty. We demonstrate the benefits of our model via an ablation study, and show its generalization performance via a cross-dataset evaluation against other recent gaze benchmark datasets. We furthermore propose a simple self-supervised approach to improve cross-dataset domain adaptation. Finally, we demonstrate an application of our model for estimating customer attention in a supermarket setting. Our dataset and models are available at

No abstract

Abstract. Recently, large breakthroughs have been observed in saliency modeling. The top scores on saliency benchmarks have become dominated by neural network models of saliency, and some evaluation scores have begun to saturate. Large jumps in performance relative to previous models can be found across datasets, image types, and evaluation metrics. Have saliency models begun to converge on human performance? In this paper, we re-examine the current state-of-the-art using a finegrained analysis on image types, individual images, and image regions. Using experiments to gather annotations for high-density regions of human eye fixations on images in two established saliency datasets, MIT300 and CAT2000, we quantify up to 60% of the remaining errors of saliency models. We argue that to continue to approach human-level performance, saliency models will need to discover higher-level concepts in images: text, objects of gaze and action, locations of motion, and expected locations of people in images. Moreover, they will need to reason about the relative importance of image regions, such as focusing on the most important person in the room or the most informative sign on the road. More accurately tracking performance will require finer-grained evaluations and metrics. Pushing performance further will require higher-level image understanding.

We introduce a saliency-based distortion layer for convolutional neural networks that helps to improve the spatial sampling of input data for a given task. Our differentiable layer can be added as a preprocessing block to existing task networks and trained altogether in an end-to-end fashion. The effect of the layer is to efficiently estimate how to sample from the original data in order to boost task performance. For example, for an image classification task in which the original data might range in size up to several megapixels, but where the desired input images to the task network are much smaller, our layer learns how best to sample from the underlying high resolution data in a manner which preserves task-relevant information better than uniform downsampling. This has the effect of creating distorted, caricature-like intermediate images, in which idiosyncratic elements of the image that improve task performance are zoomed and exaggerated. Unlike alternative approaches such as spatial transformer networks, our proposed layer is inspired by image saliency, computed efficiently from uniformly downsampled data, and degrades gracefully to a uniform sampling strategy under uncertainty. We apply our layer to improve existing networks for the tasks of human gaze estimation and fine-grained object classification. Code for our method is available in: http://github.com/recasens/Saliency-Sampler.

No abstract