Differential Contrastive Training for Gaze Estimation

The complex application scenarios have raised critical requirements for precise and generalizable gaze estimation methods. Recently, the pre-trained CLIP has achieved remarkable performance on various vision tasks, but its potentials have not been fully exploited in gaze estimation. In this paper, we propose a novel Differential Contrastive Training strategy, which boosts gaze estimation performance with the help of the CLIP. Accordingly, a Differential Contrastive Gaze Estimation network (DCGaze) composed of a Visual Appearance-aware branch and a Semantic Differential-aware branch is introduced. The Visual Appearance-aware branch is essentially a primary gaze estimation network and it incorporates an Adaptive Feature-refinement Unit (AFU) and a Double-head Gaze Regressor (DGR), which both help the primary network to extract informative and gaze-related appearance features. Moreover, the Semantic Difference-aware branch is designed on the basis of the CLIP's text encoder to reveal the semantic difference of gazes. This branch could further empower the Visual Appearance-aware branch with the capability of characterizing the gaze-related semantic information. Extensive experimental results on four challenging datasets over within and cross-domain tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our DCGaze.The code is available at https://github.com/LinZhang-bjtu/DCGaze.