text: 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.
  @cite_17: We present an approach to efficiently detect the 2D pose of multiple people in an image. The approach uses a nonparametric representation, which we refer to as Part Affinity Fields (PAFs), to learn to associate body parts with individuals in the image. The architecture encodes global context, allowing a greedy bottom-up parsing step that maintains high accuracy while achieving realtime performance, irrespective of the number of people in the image. The architecture is designed to jointly learn part locations and their association via two branches of the same sequential prediction process. Our method placed first in the inaugural COCO 2016 keypoints challenge, and significantly exceeds the previous state-of-the-art result on the MPII Multi-Person benchmark, both in performance and efficiency.
summary: Recent work in multi-person human pose estimation @cite_17 learns to estimate joint location heatmaps alongside so-called part affinity fields''. When combined, the two outputs then enable the detection of multiple peoples' joints with reduced ambiguity in terms of which person a joint belongs to. In addition, at the end of every image scale, the architecture concatenates feature maps from each separate stream such that information can flow between the part confidence'' and part affinity'' maps. Thus, they operate on the image representation space, taking advantage of the strengths of convolutional neural networks. Our work is similar in spirit in that it introduces a novel image-based representation.