  Non-invasive gaze estimation methods usually regress gaze directions directly
from a single face or eye image. However, due to important variabilities in eye
shapes and inner eye structures amongst individuals, universal models obtain
limited accuracies and their output usually exhibit high variance as well as
biases which are subject dependent. Therefore, increasing accuracy is usually
done through calibration, allowing gaze predictions for a subject to be mapped
to his/her actual gaze. In this paper, we introduce a novel image differential
method for gaze estimation. We propose to directly train a differential
convolutional neural network to predict the gaze differences between two eye
input images of the same subject. Then, given a set of subject specific
calibration images, we can use the inferred differences to predict the gaze
direction of a novel eye sample. The assumption is that by allowing the
comparison between two eye images, annoyance factors (alignment, eyelid
closing, illumination perturbations) which usually plague single image
prediction methods can be much reduced, allowing better prediction altogether.
Experiments on 3 public datasets validate our approach which constantly
outperforms state-of-the-art methods even when using only one calibration
sample or when the latter methods are followed by subject specific gaze
adaptation.
