We present a new approach to monocular learning-based gaze redirection problem in images that is able to train on raw sequences of eye images with unknown gaze directions and a small amount of eye images, where the gaze direction is known. The proposed approach is based on a pair of deep networks, where the first encoder-like network maps eye images to a latent space, while the second network maps pairs of latent representations to warping fields implementing the transformation between the pair of the original images. In the proposed system, both networks are trained in an unsupervised manner, while the gaze-annotated images are only used to estimate displacements in the latent space that are characteristic to certain gaze redirections. Quantitative and qualitative evaluation suggests that such characteristic displacement vectors in the learned latent space can be learned from few examples and are transferable across different people and different imaging conditions.

We propose a general approach to the gaze redirection problem in images that utilizes machine learning. The idea is to learn to re-synthesize images by training on pairs of images with known disparities between gaze directions. We show that such learning-based re-synthesis can achieve convincing gaze redirection based on monocular input, and that the learned systems generalize well to people and imaging conditions unseen during training. We describe and compare three instantiations of our idea. The first system is based on efficient decision forest predictors and redirects the gaze by a fixed angle in real-time (on a single CPU), being particularly suitable for the videoconferencing gaze correction. The second system is based on a deep architecture and allows gaze redirection by a range of angles. The second system achieves higher photorealism, while being several times slower. The third system is based on real-time decision forests at test time, while using the supervision from a "teacher" deep network during training. The third system approaches the quality of a teacher network in our experiments, and thus provides a highly realistic real-time monocular solution to the gaze correction problem. We present in-depth assessment and comparisons of the proposed systems based on quantitative measurements and a user study.

We revisit the well-known problem of gaze correction and present a solution based on supervised machine learning. At training time, our system observes pairs of images, where each pair contains the face of the same person with a fixed angular difference in gaze direction. It then learns to synthesize the second image of a pair from the first one. After learning, the system gets the ability to redirect the gaze of a previously unseen person by the same angular difference as in the training set. Unlike many previous solutions to gaze problem in videoconferencing, ours is purely monocular, i.e. it does not require any hardware apart from an in-built web-camera of a laptop. Being based on efficient machine learning predictors such as decision forests, the system is fast (runs in real-time on a single core of a modern laptop). In the paper, we demonstrate results on a variety of videoconferencing frames and evaluate the method quantitatively on the hold-out set of registered images. The supplementary video shows example sessions of our system at work.