3-D Head Pose Estimation in Monocular Video Sequences Using Deformable Surfaces and Radial Basis Functions

This paper presents a novel approach for estimating 3-D head pose in single-view video sequences. Following initialization by a face detector, a tracking technique that utilizes a 3-D deformable surface model to approximate the facial image intensity is used to track the face in the video sequence. Head pose estimation is performed by using a feature vector which is a byproduct of the equations that govern the deformation of the surface model used in the tracking. The afore-mentioned vector is used as input in a radial basis function interpolation network in order to estimate the 3-D head pose. The proposed method was applied to IDIAP head pose estimation database. The obtained results show that the method can estimate the head direction vector with very good accuracy.