HeadPosr: End-to-end Trainable Head Pose Estimation using Transformer Encoders

Head pose estimation (HPE) is the task of estimating head pose given an RGB image, video, or RGB-D data. In this paper, a network, HeadPosr is proposed to predict the head poses using a single RGB image. HeadPosr uses a novel architecture which includes a transformer encoder. In concrete, it consists of: (1) backbone; (2) connector; (3) transformer encoder; (4) prediction head. The significance of using a transformer encoder for HPE is studied. An extensive ablation study is performed on varying the (1) number of encoders; (2) number of heads; (3) different position embeddings; (4) different activations; (5) input channel size, in a transformer used in HeadPosr. Further studies on using: (1) different backbones, (2) using different learning rates are also shown. The elaborated experiments and ablations studies are conducted using three different open-source widely used datasets for HPE, i.e., 300W-LP, AFLW2000, and BIWI datasets. Experiments illustrate that HeadPosr outperforms all the state-of-art methods including both the landmark-free and the others based on using landmark or depth estimation on the AFLW2000 dataset and BIWI datasets when trained with 300W-LP. It also outperforms when averaging the results from the compared datasets, hence setting a benchmark for the problem of HPE, also demonstrating the effectiveness of using transformers over the state-of-the-art.