SGAP-Gaze: Scene Grid Attention Based Point-of-Gaze Estimation Network for Driver Gaze

Driver gaze provides information regarding driver visual attention and situational awareness to the surrounding traffic. Existing driver gaze estimation studies represent gaze in terms of gaze zone or gaze vector/point-of-gaze (PoG). However, object-level gaze information provides a more semantically meaningful representation of visual attention by identifying attended objects, such as vehicles, pedestrians, or traffic signals. In this study, we propose an end-to-end driver gaze object prediction framework, TransGaze-Object, Transformer-based Gaze Object prediction model. The proposed framework first extracts facial features, including face and iris-weighted eye features, along with trafficobject spatial features. A transformer based cross-attention mechanism is then used to compute similarity scores and attention weights for predicting the drivers gaze object. To train this model, we propose a benchmark driver gaze dataset, Urban Driving-Face Scene Gaze (UD-FSG), comprising synchronized driver-face and traffic-scene images, scene objects bounding boxes, and gaze labels in terms of 2D gaze coordinate and gaze object. The TransGaze-Object model achieves an overall accuracy of 60% for gaze-object prediction, compared to 51% accuracy obtained from associating the estimated Point-of-Gaze to traffic objects. The error analysis reveals that TransGaze-Object reduces confusion between traffic objects (predicted) and the background (ground-truth), achieving an error rate of 11.68%, a 49.7% relative reduction compared with 23.21% error obtained from PoG-based gaze-object association. Overall, the results demonstrate the effectiveness of directly predicting gaze objects from driver-face and traffic-scene information, rather than estimating an intermediate Point-of-Gaze and subsequently associating it with traffic objects.

Driver gaze estimation serves as a fundamental metric for evaluating driver attentiveness in modern monitoring systems. Beyond being vulnerable to sudden lighting changes and sensor noise, spatial-domain models struggle to disentangle authentic gaze cues from irrelevant visual attributes. In this paper, we propose LISA, a \textbf{L}anguage-guided \textbf{I}nterference-aware \textbf{S}patial-Frequency \textbf{A}ttention framework that combines frequency-domain priors with vision-language knowledge. Observing that the amplitude spectrum remains relatively stable even under spatial perturbations, we design a dual-domain fusion mechanism. It integrates stable low-frequency semantics into high-frequency details, employing spatial attention to precisely target ocular regions. To reduce semantic ambiguity, we also introduce a training-time disentanglement strategy. Using a frozen CLIP encoder and orthogonal regularization, we explicitly separate gaze features from appearance interference. Experiments on two benchmarks show that LISA achieves state-of-the-art performance, with significantly improved robustness against occlusions and lighting variations. The code repository is available at https://github.com/Mason-bupt/LISA.

Gaze target estimation, the task of predicting where a person is looking in a scene, is crucial to understanding human attention and intent. It is a challenging task that combines high-level understanding of global scene semantics and precise spatial reasoning using human appearance (e.g. pose, eye orientation). As a result, human-level performance remains elusive for existing models, limiting their practical application. To this end, we propose PaGE (Practical Gaze Estimator), a gaze estimation model that explicitly models the complex interaction between scene and head features. Using a PaGE model with a large ViT-H+ backbone as the teacher, we further distill student models with lighter backbones on a much larger and more diverse unlabeled dataset. The architectural improvements and novel training recipe allow PaGE to achieve state-of-the-art performance on several gaze estimation tasks, outperforming humans in 7 out of 9 metrics while reducing the human-AI gap by at least 60% in the remaining 2. The distilled student models retain most of the teacher's performance while being lightweight enough for practical deployment on robots and consumer devices. The code and model checkpoints are available at our project page.