Head Pose Estimation on Top of Haar-Like Face Detection: A Study Using the Kinect Sensor

Sensors

Anwar Saeed¹  Ayoub Al-Hamadi¹  Ahmed Ghoneim² 

[1] Institute for Information Technology and Communications (IIKT), Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg, Magdeburg D-39016, Germany; E-Mail:;Department of Software Engineering, College of Computer Science and Information Sciences, King Saud University, Riyadh 11451, Saudi Arabia; E-Mail:

关键词: head pose;    local binary pattern;    histogram of gradient;    Gabor filter;    Kinect sensor;    support vector machine;    regression;   

DOI  :  10.3390/s150920945

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

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 exceedingfor pitch, yaw and roll angles, respectively.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.