CUEING: A pioneer work of encoding human gaze for autonomous driving

Recent analysis of incidents involving Autonomous Driving Systems (ADS) has shown that the decision-making process of ADS can be significantly different from that of human drivers. To improve the performance of ADS, it may be helpful to incorporate the human decision-making process, particularly the signals provided by the human gaze. There are many existing works to create human gaze datasets and predict the human gaze using deep learning models. However, current datasets of human gaze are noisy and include irrelevant objects that can hinder model training. Additionally, existing CNN-based models for predicting human gaze lack generalizability across different datasets and driving conditions, and many models have a centre bias in their prediction such that the gaze tends to be generated in the centre of the gaze map. To address these gaps, we propose an adaptive method for cleansing existing human gaze datasets and a robust convolutional self-attention gaze prediction model. Our quantitative metrics show that our cleansing method improves models' performance by up to 7.38% and generalizability by up to 8.24% compared to those trained on the original datasets. Furthermore, our model demonstrates an improvement of up to 12.13% in terms of generalizability compared to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) models. Notably, it achieves these gains while conserving up to 98.12% of computation resources.