Locating Nosetips and Estimating Head Pose in Images by Tensorposes

This paper introduces a head pose estimation system that localizes nose-tip of the faces and estimate head poses in images simultaneously. After the nose-tip in the training data are manually labeled, the appearance variation caused by head pose changes is characterized by tensor model. Given images with unknown head pose and nose-tip location, the nose-tip of the face is localized in a coarse-to-fine fashion, and the head pose can be estimated simultaneously. We evaluated our system on the Pointing'04 head pose image database with 50% of the data as training set and the rest as testing set. With the nose-tip location provided, our head pose estimators can achieve 94% head pose classification accuracy(within plusmn15deg). With nose-tip automatically localized, we achieves 85% nose-tip localization accuracy(within 3 pixels from the ground truth), and 81% head pose classification accuracy (within plusmn15deg).