Single snapshot-based 3D head pose initialization for tracking in a HRI scenario

This paper presents an automatic 3D head pose initialization scheme for a real-time face tracker with application to human-robot interaction. It has two main contributions. First, we propose an automatic 3D head pose and person specific face shape estimation, based on a 3D deformable model. The proposed approach serves to initialize our real-time 3D face tracker. What makes this contribution very attractive is that the initialization step can cope with faces under arbitrary pose, so it is not limited only to near-frontal views. Second, the previous framework is used to develop an application in which the orientation of an AIBO´s camera can be controlled through the imitation of user´s head pose. In our scenario, this application is used to build panoramic images from overlapping snapshots. Experiments on real videos confirm the robustness and usefulness of the proposed methods.