When Computer Vision Gazes at Cognition

Understand

Joint attention is a core, early-developing form of social interaction.

• It is based on our ability to discriminate the third party objects that other people are looking at.
• While it has been shown that people can accurately determine whether another person is looking directly at them versus away, little is known about human ability to discriminate a third person gaze directed towards objects that are further away, especially in unconstraint cases where the looker can move her head and eyes freely.
• In this paper we address this question by jointly exploring human psychophysics and a cognitively motivated computer vision model, which can detect the 3D direction of gaze from 2D face images.