Estimation of 3D head region using gait motion for surveillance video

Detecting and recognizing people is important in surveillance. Many detection approaches use local information, such as pattern and colour, which can lead to constraints on application such as changes in illumination, low resolution, and camera view point. In this paper we propose a novel method for estimating the 3D head region based on analysing the gait motion derived from the video provided by a single camera. Generally, when a person walks there is known head movement in the vertical direction, regardless of the walking direction. Using this characteristic the gait period is detected using wavelet decomposition and the heel strike position is calculated in 3D space. Then, a 3D gait trajectory model is constructed by non-linear optimization. We evaluate our new approach using the CAVIAR database and show that we can indeed determine the head region to good effect. The contributions of this research include the first use of detecting a face region by using human gait and which has fewer application constraints than many previous approaches.