Sharingan: A Transformer Architecture for Multi-Person Gaze Following

Gaze is a powerful form of non-verbal communication that humans develop from an early age. As such, modeling this behavior is an important task that can benefit a broad set of application domains ranging from robotics to sociology. In particular, the gaze following task in computer vision is defined as the prediction of the 2D pixel coordinates where a person in the image is looking. Previous attempts in this area have primarily centered on CNN-based architectures, but they have been constrained by the need to process one person at a time, which proves to be highly inefficient. In this paper, we introduce a novel and effective multi-person transformer-based architecture for gaze prediction. While there exist prior works using transformers for multi-person gaze prediction (Tu et al., Tonini et al.), they use a fixed set of learnable embeddings to decode both the person and its gaze target, which requires a matching step afterward to link the predictions with the annotations. Thus, it is difficult to quantitatively evaluate these methods reliably with the available benchmarks, or integrate them into a larger human behavior understanding system. Instead, we are the first to propose a multi-person transformer-based architecture that maintains the original task formulation and ensures control over the people fed as input. Our main contribution lies in encoding the person-specific information into a single controlled token to be processed alongside image tokens and using its output for prediction based on a novel multiscale decoding mechanism. Our new architecture achieves state-of-the-art results on the GazeFollow, VideoAttentionTarget, and ChildPlay datasets and significantly outperforms existing multi-person architectures. Our code, checkpoints, and other artifacts will be made publicly available upon acceptance.