DGAGaze: Gaze Estimation with Dual-Stream Differential Attention and Geometry-Aware Temporal Alignment

Gaze estimation plays a crucial role in human-computer interaction and behavior analysis. However, in dynamic scenes, rigid head movements and rapid gaze shifts pose significant challenges to accurate gaze prediction. Most existing methods either process single-frame images independently or rely on long video sequences, making it difficult to simultaneously achieve strong performance and high computational efficiency. To address this issue, we propose DGAGaze, a gaze estimation framework based on a difference-driven spatiotemporal attention mechanism. This framework uses a geometry-aware temporal alignment module to mitigate interference from rigid head movements, compensating for them through pose estimation and affine feature warping, thereby achieving explicit decoupling between global head motion and local eye motion. Based on the aligned features, inter-frame differences are used to adjust spatial and channel attention weights, enhancing motion-sensitive representations without introducing an additional temporal modeling layer. Extensive experiments on the EyeDiap and Gaze360 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. DGAGaze achieves improved gaze estimation accuracy while maintaining a lightweight architecture based on a ResNet-18 backbone, outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods.