We address a problem of estimating pose of a person's head from its RGB image. The employment of CNNs for the problem has contributed to significant improvement in accuracy in recent works. However, we show that the following two methods, despite their simplicity, can attain further improvement: (i) proper adjustment of the margin of bounding box of a detected face, and (ii) choice of loss functions. We show that the integration of these two methods achieve the new state-of-the-art on standard benchmark datasets for in-the-wild head pose estimation.
The head pose estimation problem has been investigated using various approaches. Murphy- @cite_13 reviewed methods which use additional sensors such as laser pointers, magnetic and inertial sensors to get a stable estimation in controlled situations. In addition, some methods apply appearance template models to compare test images with a set of pose exemplars @cite_24 @cite_26 @cite_11 or train multiple face detectors for different head poses @cite_17 @cite_29 . The most recently proposed head pose estimation methods can be categorized into two groups by input image types: RGB-D image based methods and RGB image based methods.
@cite_26 @cite_11 @cite_29 @cite_24 @cite_13 @cite_17
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Head pose estimation in low resolution is a challenge problem. Traditional pose estimation algorithms, which assume faces have been well aligned before pose estimation, would face much difficulty in this situation, since face alignment itself does not work well in this low resolution scenario. In this paper, we propose to estimate head pose using view-based multi-view face detectors directly. Naive Bayesian classifier is then applied to fuse the information of head pose from multiple camera views. To model the temporal changing of head pose, Hidden Markov Model is used to obtain the optimal sequence of head pose with greatest likelihood. Head tracking and pose estimation are usually considered as two sequential and separate problems: pose is estimated on the head patch provided by a tracking module. However, precision in head pose estimation is dependent on tracking accuracy which itself could benefit from the head orientation knowledge. Therefore, this work considers head tracking and pose estimation as two coupled problems in a probabilistic setting. Head pose models are learned and incorporated into a mixed-state particle filter framework for joint head tracking and pose estimation. Experimental results on real sequences show the effectiveness of the method in estimating more stable and accurate pose values. In this paper, we address the problem of free head motion in appearance-based gaze estimation. This problem remains challenging because head motion changes eye appearance significantly, and thus, training images captured for an original head pose cannot handle test images captured for other head poses. To overcome this difficulty, we propose a novel gaze estimation method that handles free head motion via eye image synthesis based on a single camera. Compared with conventional fixed head pose methods with original training images, our method only captures four additional eye images under four reference head poses, and then, precisely synthesizes new training images for other unseen head poses in estimation. To this end, we propose a single-directional (SD) flow model to efficiently handle eye image variations due to head motion. We show how to estimate SD flows for reference head poses first, and then use them to produce new SD flows for training image synthesis. Finally, with synthetic training images, joint optimization is applied that simultaneously solves an eye image alignment and a gaze estimation. Evaluation of the method was conducted through experiments to assess its performance and demonstrate its effectiveness. Abstract Real-time identity-independent estimation of head pose from prototype images is a perplexing task requiring pose-invariant face detection. The problem is exacerbated by changes in illumination, identity and facial position. We approach the problem using a view-based statistical learning technique based on similarity of images to prototypes. For this method to be effective, facial images must be transformed in such a way as to emphasise differences in pose while suppressing differences in identity. We investigate appropriate transformations for use with a similarity-to-prototypes philosophy. The results show that orientation-selective Gabor filters enhance differences in pose and that different filter orientations are optimal at different poses. In contrast, principal component analysis (PCA) was found to provide an identity-invariant representation in which similarities can be calculated more robustly. We also investigate the angular resolution at which pose changes can be resolved using our methods. An angular resolution of 10° was found to be sufficiently discriminable at some poses but not at others, while 20° is quite acceptable at most poses.