The AISL head orientation database and preliminary evaluations

In this paper, we describe the acquisition procedure and contents of a head orientation database, called as AISL head orientation database. The primary goals of creating the AISL head orientation database includes the following: (1) providing a new challenge of the head orientation database that is sufficient to simulate the impact of background changes in real applications; (2) helping the development of the state of the art techniques for estimating head orientation in real applications; and (3) covering multiple races which include Indonesian, Japanese, Latin of American and Netherland people. This database consists of 6,480 images of the full view the head of 20 persons. A turntable system equipped with two Kinect cameras is utilized to simultaneously capture 36 images with interval 10°. Each subject is asked to look straight ahead, up and down to obtain 324 images in three shots and three times of background change. We also discuss the preliminary evaluation based on the AISL database and present the performance of two state-of-the-art appearance-based head pose classification methods to do the following: (1) evaluate the difficulty of the database for classifying or estimating head orientation; (2) preference evaluation results for researchers using the database; and (3) identify the strengths and weaknesses of the commonly used methods.