Gaze Estimation

Estimating human gaze target from visible images is a critical task for robots to understand human attention, yet the development of generalizable neural architectures and training paradigms remains challenging. While recent advances in pre-trained vision foundation models offer promising avenues for locating gaze targets, the integration of multi-modal cues -- including eyes, head poses, gestures, and contextual features -- demands adaptive and efficient decoding mechanisms. Inspired by Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) for adaptive domain expertise in large vision-language models, we propose GazeMoE, a novel end-to-end framework that selectively leverages gaze-target-related cues from a frozen foundation model through MoE modules. To address class imbalance in gaze target classification (in-frame vs. out-of-frame) and enhance robustness, GazeMoE incorporates a class-balancing auxiliary loss alongside strategic data augmentations, including region-specific cropping and photometric transformations. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our GazeMoE achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming existing methods on challenging gaze estimation tasks. The code and pre-trained models are released at https://huggingface.co/zdai257/GazeMoE

Traditional approaches to measuring visual exploratory behavior in soccer rely on counting visual exploratory actions (VEAs) based on rapid head movements exceeding 125°/s, but this method suffer from player position bias (i.e., a focus on central midfielders), annotation challenges, binary measurement constraints (i.e., a player is scanning, or not), lack the power to predict relevant short-term in-game future success, and are incompatible with fundamental soccer analytics models such as pitch control. This research introduces a novel formulaic continuous stochastic vision layer to quantify players' visual perception from pose-enhanced spatiotemporal tracking. Our probabilistic field-of-view and occlusion models incorporate head and shoulder rotation angles to create speed-dependent vision maps for individual players in a two-dimensional top-down plane. We combine these vision maps with pitch control and pitch value surfaces to analyze the awaiting phase (when a player is awaiting the ball to arrive after a pass for a teammate) and their subsequent on-ball phase. We demonstrate that aggregated visual metrics - such as the percentage of defended area observed while awaiting a pass - are predictive of controlled pitch value gained at the end of dribbling actions using 32 games of synchronized pose-enhanced tracking data and on-ball event data from the 2024 Copa America. This methodology works regardless of player position, eliminates manual annotation requirements, and provides continuous measurements that seamlessly integrate into existing soccer analytics frameworks. To further support the integration with existing soccer analytics frameworks we open-source the tools required to make these calculations.

Mobile eye-tracking is crucial for capturing human visual attention in real-world and XR settings, supporting research and human-computer interaction. Yet blinks, pupil-detection errors and lighting changes create missing values that hinder gaze analysis. We present HAGI++, a multi-modal diffusion-based imputation method that, for the first time, leverages integrated head-orientation sensors to exploit the natural correlation between head and eye movements. Using a transformer-based diffusion model, it learns cross-modal dependencies between eye and head data and can additionally incorporate wrist/hand motion when such wearable signals are available. Evaluations on the large-scale Nymeria, Ego-Exo4D and HOT3D datasets show that HAGI++ consistently outperforms traditional interpolation and deep-learning time-series imputation baselines. Statistical analysis confirms that its gaze-velocity distributions closely match real human behaviour, yielding realistic imputations. Even when 100% of gaze data are missing (pure gaze generation), HAGI++ exceeds methods that rely on the visual inputs and the methods rely on full-body motion capture by incorporating wrist motion from commercial wearables. Our approach enables more complete, accurate eye-gaze recordings in real-world contexts, enhancing gaze-based analysis and interaction across many applications. Our code is available at https://git.cai.simtech.uni-stuttgart.de/public-projects/HAGI

This paper evaluates the current gaze estimation methods within a human-robot interaction (HRI) context of a shared workspace scenario. We introduce a new, annotated dataset collected with the NICO robotic platform. We evaluate four state-of-the-art gaze estimation models. The evaluation shows that the angular errors are close to those reported on general-purpose benchmarks. However, when expressed in terms of distance in the shared workspace the best median error is 14.57~cm, quantifying the practical limitations of current methods. We conclude by discussing these limitations and offering recommendations on how to best integrate gaze estimation as a modality in HRI systems.

Mobile gaze tracking on handheld devices commonly relies on appearance-based 2D gaze estimation from the device's front-facing RGB camera. Although this approach makes eye tracking more accessible by avoiding dedicated infrared hardware, maintaining accuracy remains difficult because the spatial relationship among the user's face, the camera, and the screen changes continuously during handheld use. This paper examines how motion-related geometry change affects a representative front-camera RGB 2D gaze-estimation pipeline. We report two complementary within-subject user studies ($n=10$) that capture handheld behaviour, calibration data, and gaze-estimation error during everyday-style mobile tasks across conditions ranging from lying and sitting to walking and maze navigation. Rather than treating motion as a single binary factor, we analyse within-task versus task-switch behaviour, calibration-test mismatch, and condition-specific motion signatures. Behavioural results show that head-to-camera distance is comparatively stable during sustained within-task use, while task switches introduce much larger geometry fluctuations, with head-distance standard deviations of approximately 7.42--10.10,cm across conditions. In the gaze-evaluation study, one-off calibration reduced average RMSE from 4.49,cm to 3.44,cm; under this regime, the global effect of motion condition on RMSE was not statistically reliable, whereas clearer patterns appeared in task-specific and motion-specific calibration analyses, where better calibration-test match reduced error.

Gaze following aims to predict where a person is looking in a scene, by predicting the target location, or indicating that the target is located outside the image. Recent works detect the gaze target by training a heatmap regression task with a pixel-wise mean-square error (MSE) loss, while formulating the in/out prediction task as a binary classification task. This training formulation puts a strict, pixel-level constraint in higher resolution on the single annotation available in training, and does not consider annotation variance and the correlation between the two subtasks. To address these issues, we introduce the patch distribution prediction (PDP) method. We replace the in/out prediction branch in previous models with the PDP branch, by predicting a patch-level gaze distribution that also considers the outside cases. Experiments show that our model regularizes the MSE loss by predicting better heatmap distributions on images with larger annotation variances, meanwhile bridging the gap between the target prediction and in/out prediction subtasks, showing a significant improvement in performance on both subtasks on public gaze following datasets. Code is available at: https://github.com/qiaomu-miao/gazefollowing_pdp