Head pose estimation using isophote features for driver assistance systems

In this paper, we consider the problem of estimating the pose of a driver from video data. We propose to use isophote features to improve classification performance when illumination varies. In particular, we both use the direction and curvature features. The features are encoded into direction histogram and curvature histogram in the blocks of the image. Experimental results show that the proposed features could well describe the structure of driver face image, and have a good performance in real scene.