Head Pose Estimation on Top of Haar-Like Face Detection: A Study Using the Kinect Sensor.
Head pose estimation is a crucial initial task for human face analysis, which is employed in several computer vision systems, such as: facial expression recognition, head gesture recognition, yawn detection, etc. In this work, we propose a frame-based approach to estimate the head pose on top of the Viola and Jones (VJ) Haar-like face detector. Several appearance and depth-based feature types are employed for the pose estimation, where comparisons between them in terms of accuracy and speed are presented. It is clearly shown through this work that using the depth data, we improve the accuracy of the head pose estimation. Additionally, we can spot positive detections, faces in profile views detected by the frontal model, that are wrongly cropped due to background disturbances. We introduce a new depth-based feature descriptor that provides competitive estimation results with a lower computation time. Evaluation on a benchmark Kinect database shows that the histogram of oriented gradients and the developed depth-based features are more distinctive for the head pose estimation, where they compare favorably to the current state-of-the-art approaches. Using a concatenation of the aforementioned feature types, we achieved a head pose estimation with average errors not exceeding 5:1; 4:6; 4:2 for pitch, yaw and roll angles, respectively.
Institute for Information Technology and Communications (IIKT), Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg, Magdeburg D-39016, Germany. anwar.saeed@ovgu.de.
Anwar
A
Saeed
Institute for Information Technology and Communications (IIKT), Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg, Magdeburg D-39016, Germany. Ayoub.Al-Hamadi@ovgu.de.
Ayoub
A
Al-Hamadi
Department of Software Engineering, College of Computer Science and Information Sciences, King Saud University, Riyadh 11451, Saudi Arabia. ghoneim@KSU.EDU.SA.|Department of Computer Science, College of Science, Menoufia University, Menoufia 32721, Egypt. ghoneim@KSU.EDU.SA.
Ahmed
A
Ghoneim
D000465:Algorithms; D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D001699:Biometry / Q000379:methods*; D005145:Face / Q000033:anatomy & histology*; D006257:Head / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D010363:Pattern Recognition, Automated / Q000379:methods*; D011187:Posture / Q000502:physiology*
Gabor filter; Kinect sensor; head pose; histogram of gradient; local binary pattern; regression; support vector machine