Estimating human gaze from natural eye images only is a challenging task. Gaze direction can be defined by the pupil- and the eyeball center where the latter is unobservable in 2D images. Hence, achieving highly accurate gaze estimates is an ill-posed problem. In this paper, we introduce a novel deep neural network architecture specifically designed for the task of gaze estimation from single eye input. Instead of directly regressing two angles for the pitch and yaw of the eyeball, we regress to an intermediate pictorial representation which in turn simplifies the task of 3D gaze direction estimation. Our quantitative and qualitative results show that our approach achieves higher accuracies than the state-of-the-art and is robust to variation in gaze, head pose and image quality.
It has been shown @cite_4 @cite_28 that by applying a loss function on intermediate outputs of a network, better performance can be yielded in different tasks. This technique was introduced to address the vanishing gradients problem during the training of deeper networks. In addition, such intermediate supervision allows for the network to quickly learn an estimate for the final output then learn to refine the predicted features - simplifying the mappings which need to be learned at every layer. Subsequent works have adopted intermediate supervision @cite_15 @cite_18 to good effect for human pose estimation, by replicating the final output loss.
@cite_28 @cite_15 @cite_4 @cite_18
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Supervised training of neural networks for classification is typically performed with a global loss function. The loss function provides a gradient for the output layer, and this gradient is back-propagated to hidden layers to dictate an update direction for the weights. An alternative approach is to train the network with layer-wise loss functions. In this paper we demonstrate, for the first time, that layer-wise training can approach the state-of-the-art on a variety of image datasets. We use single-layer sub-networks and two different supervised loss functions to generate local error signals for the hidden layers, and we show that the combination of these losses help with optimization in the context of local learning. Using local errors could be a step towards more biologically plausible deep learning because the global error does not have to be transported back to hidden layers. A completely backprop free variant outperforms previously reported results among methods aiming for higher biological plausibility. Code is available this https URL Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNets) have successfully contributed to improve the accuracy of regression-based methods for computer vision tasks such as human pose estimation, landmark localization, and object detection. The network optimization has been usually performed with L2 loss and without considering the impact of outliers on the training process, where an outlier in this context is defined by a sample estimation that lies at an abnormal distance from the other training sample estimations in the objective space. In this work, we propose a regression model with ConvNets that achieves robustness to such outliers by minimizing Tukey's biweight function, an M-estimator robust to outliers, as the loss function for the ConvNet. In addition to the robust loss, we introduce a coarse-to-fine model, which processes input images of progressively higher resolutions for improving the accuracy of the regressed values. In our experiments, we demonstrate faster convergence and better generalization of our robust loss function for the tasks of human pose estimation and age estimation from face images. We also show that the combination of the robust loss function with the coarse-to-fine model produces comparable or better results than current state-of-the-art approaches in four publicly available human pose estimation datasets. Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNets) have successfully contributed to improve the accuracy of regression-based methods for computer vision tasks such as human pose estimation, landmark localization, and object detection. The network optimization has been usually performed with L2 loss and without considering the impact of outliers on the training process, where an outlier in this context is defined by a sample estimation that lies at an abnormal distance from the other training sample estimations in the objective space. In this work, we propose a regression model with ConvNets that achieves robustness to such outliers by minimizing Tukey's biweight function, an M-estimator robust to outliers, as the loss function for the ConvNet. In addition to the robust loss, we introduce a coarse-to-fine model, which processes input images of progressively higher resolutions for improving the accuracy of the regressed values. In our experiments, we demonstrate faster convergence and better generalization of our robust loss function for the tasks of human pose estimation and age estimation from face images. We also show that the combination of the robust loss function with the coarse-to-fine model produces comparable or better results than current state-of-the-art approaches in four publicly available human pose estimation datasets. Incorporating encoding-decoding nets with adversarial nets has been widely adopted in image generation tasks. We observe that the state-of-the-art achievements were obtained by carefully balancing the reconstruction loss and adversarial loss, and such balance shifts with different network structures, datasets, and training strategies. Empirical studies have demonstrated that an inappropriate weight between the two losses may cause instability, and it is tricky to search for the optimal setting, especially when lacking prior knowledge on the data and network. This paper gives the first attempt to relax the need of manual balancing by proposing the concept of , where a novel network structure is designed that explicitly disentangles the backpropagation paths of the two losses. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness, robustness, and generality of the proposed method. The other contribution of the paper is the design of a new evaluation metric to measure the image quality of generative models. We propose the so-called (NRDS), which introduces the idea of relative comparison, rather than providing absolute estimates like existing metrics.