The goal of gaze estimation is to estimate a gaze vector from an image containing a face or eye(s). Most existing studies use pre-defined fixed-resolution images to estimate the gaze vector. However, images captured from in-the-wild environments may have various resolutions, and variation in resolution can degrade gaze estimation performance. To address this problem, a gaze estimation method from arbitrary-sized low-resolution images is proposed. The basic idea of the proposed method is to combine knowledge distillation and feature adaptation. Knowledge distillation helps the gaze estimator for arbitrary-sized images generate a feature map similar to that from a high-resolution image. Feature adaptation makes creating a feature map adaptive to various resolutions of an input image possible by using a low-resolution image and its scale information together. It is shown that combining these two ideas improves gaze estimation performance substantially in the ablation study. It is also demonstrated that the proposed method can be generalized to other popularly used gaze estimation models through experiments using various backbones.
Keywords: deep neural network; feature adaptation; gaze estimation; knowledge distillation.