Localizing the Gaze Target of a Crowd of People

What target is focused on by many people? Analysis of the target is a crucial task, especially in a cinema, a stadium, and so on. However, it is very difficult to estimate the gaze of each person in a crowd accurately and simultaneously with existing image-based eye tracking methods, since the image resolution of each person becomes low when we capture the whole crowd with a distant camera. Therefore, we introduce a new approach for localizing the gaze target focused on by a crowd of people. The proposed framework aggregates the individually estimated results of each person’s gaze. It enables us to localize the target being focused on by them even though each person’s gaze localization from a low-resolution image is inaccurate. We analyze the effects of an aggregation method on the localization accuracy using images capturing a crowd of people in a tennis stadium under the assumption that all of the people are focusing on the same target, and also investigate the effect of the number of people involved in the aggregation on the localization accuracy. As a result, the proposed method showed the ability to improve the localization accuracy as it is applied to a larger crowd of people.