Gaze Estimation for Assisted Living Environments
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Effective assisted living environments must be able to perform inferences on how their occupants interact with one another as well as with surrounding objects. To accomplish this goal using a vision-based automated approach, multiple tasks such as pose estimation, object segmentation and gaze estimation must be addressed. Gaze direction in particular provides some of the strongest indications of how a person interacts with the environment. In this paper, we propose a simple neural network regressor that estimates the gaze direction of individuals in a multi-camera assisted living scenario, relying only on the relative positions of facial keypoints collected from a single pose estimation model. To handle cases of keypoint occlusion, our model exploits a novel confidence gated unit in its input layer. In addition to the gaze direction, our model also outputs an estimation of its own prediction uncertainty. Experimental results on a public benchmark demonstrate that our approach performs on pair with a complex, dataset-specific baseline, while its uncertainty predictions are highly correlated to the actual angular error of corresponding estimations. Finally, experiments on images from a real assisted living environment demonstrate the higher suitability of our model for its final application.
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