3D head pose estimation from multiple distant views
Xenophon Zabulis, Thomas Sarmis, Antonis Argyros · 2009
3D head pose estimation constitutes a special problem of human motion modeling. An accurate and robust solution to this problem is of particular interest, because the 3D head pose of a human conveys important information on his/her behavior. Significant advances have been achieved in human head pose estimation for relatively close-range images, but the related available methods are not directly applicable in wider-range imaging conditions. The proposed method is overviewed in Fig. 1. The visual hull of a person is obtained from images acquired synchronously from multiple viewpoints. While moving, the person’s head is tracked in 3D employing a variant of the Mean-Shift algorithm and a spherical kernel. The texture on the surface of the hull is collected from multiple views and projected on a hypothetical sphere S that is concentric to the person’s head. This gives rise to spherical image Is within which face detection is simplified, because exactly one frontal face is guaranteed to appear in it at a known spatial scale.