Mayar Elfares

Abstract

Latest gaze estimation methods require large-scale training data but their collection and exchange pose significant privacy risks. We propose PrivatEyes - the first privacy-enhancing training approach for appearance-based gaze estimation based on federated learning (FL) and secure multi-party computation (MPC). PrivatEyes enables training gaze estimators on multiple local datasets across different users and server-based secure aggregation of the individual estimators' updates. PrivatEyes guarantees that individual gaze data remains private even if a majority of the aggregating servers is malicious. We also introduce a new data leakage attack DualView that shows that PrivatEyes limits the leakage of private training data more effectively than previous approaches. Evaluations on the MPIIGaze, MPIIFaceGaze, GazeCapture, and NVGaze datasets further show that the improved privacy does not lead to a lower gaze estimation accuracy or substantially higher computational costs - both of which are on par with its non-secure counterparts.

Abstract

Latest gaze estimation methods require large-scale training data but their collection and exchange pose significant privacy risks. We propose PrivatEyes - the first privacy-enhancing training approach for appearance-based gaze estimation based on federated learning (FL) and secure multi-party computation (MPC). PrivatEyes enables training gaze estimators on multiple local datasets across different users and server-based secure aggregation of the individual estimators' updates. PrivatEyes guarantees that individual gaze data remains private even if a majority of the aggregating servers is malicious. We also introduce a new data leakage attack DualView that shows that PrivatEyes limits the leakage of private training data more effectively than previous approaches. Evaluations on the MPIIGaze, MPIIFaceGaze, GazeCapture, and NVGaze datasets further show that the improved privacy does not lead to a lower gaze estimation accuracy or substantially higher computational costs - both of which are on par with its non-secure counterparts.

Abstract

Gaze estimation methods have significantly matured in recent years but the large number of eye images required to train deep learning models poses significant privacy risks. In addition, the heterogeneous data distribution across different users can significantly hinder the training process. In this work, we propose the first federated learning approach for gaze estimation to preserve the privacy of gaze data. We further employ pseudo-gradients optimisation to adapt our federated learning approach to the divergent model updates to address the heterogeneous nature of in-the-wild gaze data in collaborative setups. We evaluate our approach on a real-world dataset (MPIIGaze dataset) and show that our work enhances the privacy guarantees of conventional appearance-based gaze estimation methods, handles the convergence issues of gaze estimators, and significantly outperforms vanilla federated learning by 15.8 % (from a mean error of 10.83 degrees to 8.95 degrees). As such, our work paves the way to develop privacy-aware collaborative learning setups for gaze estimation while maintaining the model's performance.

Abstract

Gaze estimation methods have significantly matured in recent years but the large number of eye images required to train deep learning models poses significant privacy risks. In addition, the heterogeneous data distribution across different users can significantly hinder the training process. In this work, we propose the first federated learning approach for gaze estimation to preserve the privacy of gaze data. We further employ pseudo-gradients optimisation to adapt our federated learning approach to the divergent model updates to address the heterogeneous nature of in-the-wild gaze data in collaborative setups. We evaluate our approach on a real-world dataset (MPIIGaze dataset) and show that our work enhances the privacy guarantees of conventional appearance-based gaze estimation methods, handles the convergence issues of gaze estimators, and significantly outperforms vanilla federated learning by 15.8 % (from a mean error of 10.83 degrees to 8.95 degrees). As such, our work paves the way to develop privacy-aware collaborative learning setups for gaze estimation while maintaining the model's performance.