Real-time estimation of human attention field in LWIR and color surveillance videos

Knowing the visual attention field of a monitored subject is of great value for many applications including surveillance and marketing. This paper proposes first to track peoplepsilas bodies, and then estimates visual attention field for each human using head pose information. The proposed head pose technique aims at estimating the yaw angle only. The method is shown to operate on monocular color camera sequences and is further refined with the data from a thermal sensor. In typical monocular tracking sequences the resolution of the head is very low and parts of the head are occluded with the face often invisible to the camera. We propose a method of combining a skin color detector with the direction of motion in a probabilistic way. We show how head profile obtained from the thermal sequence can be used to further improve the result.