Detecting and tracking of 3D face pose for human-robot interaction

Faces play a major role in many HCI systems, because they represent a rich source of information. Being able to estimate the 3D face pose in real-time, we can get a clue about user´s intentions or to assess which object become his/her focus of attention. This paper has two main contributions. First, we propose an automatic 3D face pose initialization scheme for our real-time tracker by adopting a 2D face detector and an eigenface system. Second, we use the proposed methods - the initialization and tracking - for controlling the orientation of an AIBO camera. We show how the changes in user´s face movement can be imitated by the robot´s camera and how it can be applied to map an indoor scene.