# Object-aware Gaze Target Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.09662 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09662/

## Key facts

- Cited by 27 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Jul 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Towards Robust Monocular Depth Estimation: Mixing Datasets for Zero-shot Cross-dataset Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01341/) (2019)
- [Gaze360: Physically Unconstrained Gaze Estimation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10088/) (2019)
- [Detecting Attended Visual Targets in Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02501/) (2020)
- [In the Eye of the Beholder: Gaze and Actions in First Person Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.00626/) (2020)
- [Connecting Gaze, Scene, and Attention: Generalized Attention Estimation via Joint Modeling of Gaze and Scene Saliency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10437/) (2018)
- [End-to-End Human-Gaze-Target Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10433/) (2022)
- [Believe It or Not, We Know What You Are Looking at!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02364/) (2019)
- [A Modular Multimodal Architecture for Gaze Target Prediction: Application to Privacy-Sensitive Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05158/) (2023)
- [Domain Adaptation Gaze Estimation by Embedding with Prediction Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.07526/) (2020)
- [Multimodal Across Domains Gaze Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10822/) (2022)
- [Patch-level Gaze Distribution Prediction for Gaze Following](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11062/) (2022)
- [Weakly Supervised Attended Object Detection Using Gaze Data as Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07090/) (2022)
- [Gaze-based Object Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15651/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Gaze-LLE: Gaze Target Estimation via Large-Scale Learned Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09586/) (2024)
- [Modeling Multimodal Social Interactions: New Challenges and Baselines with Densely Aligned Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02090/) (2024)
- [ViTGaze: Gaze Following with Interaction Features in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12778/) (2024)
- [GazeHTA: End-to-end Gaze Target Detection with Head-Target Association](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10718/) (2024)
- [OAT: Object-Level Attention Transformer for Gaze Scanpath Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13335/) (2024)
- [Diffusion-Refined VQA Annotations for Semi-Supervised Gaze Following](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02774/) (2024)
- [Multi-view Gaze Target Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05857/) (2025)
- [Omni-MMSI: Toward Identity-attributed Social Interaction Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.00267/) (2026)
- [A Novel Framework for Multi-Person Temporal Gaze Following and Social Gaze Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10511/) (2024)
- [GA3CE: Unconstrained 3D Gaze Estimation with Gaze-Aware 3D Context Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10671/) (2025)
- [GEM: Context-Aware Gaze EstiMation with Visual Search Behavior Matching for Chest Radiograph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05502/) (2024)
- [Socially Pertinent Robots in Gerontological Healthcare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07560/) (2024)
- [3D Gaze Tracking for Studying Collaborative Interactions in Mixed-Reality Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11003/) (2024)
- [Upper-Body Pose-based Gaze Estimation for Privacy-Preserving 3D Gaze Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17886/) (2024)
- [GazeDETR: Gaze Detection using Disentangled Head and Gaze Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.12966/) (2025)
- [GaTector+: A Unified Head-free Framework for Gaze Object and Gaze Following Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25301/) (2025)
- [Cross-Paradigm Evaluation of Gaze-Based Semantic Object Identification for Intelligent Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.01452/) (2026)
- [CAPE: A CLIP-Aware Pointing Ensemble of Complementary Heatmap Cues for Embodied Reference Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21888/) (2025)
- [GazeD: Context-Aware Diffusion for Accurate 3D Gaze Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12948/) (2026)
- [GazeMoE: Perception of Gaze Target with Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06256/) (2026)
- [OmniGF: A Dual-Branch Vision-Language Framework for Unified Gaze Following](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.26399/) (2026)
- [Multi-scale Object-Aware Gaze Estimation via Geometric Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.29334/) (2026)
- [PAGE: Towards Practical Human-level Gaze Target Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.04860/) (2026)
- [Gaze-Anchored Social Net: Decoding Implicit Relations via Joint Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.22847/) (2026)
- [Gaze Target Estimation Anywhere with Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.11367/) (2026)
- [From Gaze to Meaning: A Training-Free AI Agent for Unified Grounding and Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.06208/) (2026)
- [TransGaze-Object: Transformer Based Driver Gaze Object Prediction Framework in Real Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.10139/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Gaze target detection aims to predict the image location where the person is looking and the probability that a gaze is out of the scene. Several works have tackled this task by regressing a gaze heatmap centered on the gaze location, however, they overlooked decoding the relationship between the people and the gazed objects. This paper proposes a Transformer-based architecture that automatically detects objects (including heads) in the scene to build associations between every head and the gazed-head/object, resulting in a comprehensive, explainable gaze analysis composed of: gaze target area, gaze pixel point, the class and the image location of the gazed-object. Upon evaluation of the in-the-wild benchmarks, our method achieves state-of-the-art results on all metrics (up to 2.91% gain in AUC, 50% reduction in gaze distance, and 9% gain in out-of-frame average precision) for gaze target detection and 11-13% improvement in average precision for the classification and the localization of the gazed-objects. The code of the proposed method is publicly available.