Joint estimation of head pose and visual focus of attention

Head pose is an important indicator of a person's visual focus of attention (VFoA). A traditional way to recognize VFoA is to consider accurate head pose or gaze estimations. However, these estimations usually degrade drastically in middle or low resolution video data. In this paper, a joint estimation of head pose and VFoA is proposed to address this issue; both head pose and VFoA are iteratively refined until convergence. This approach is evaluated in a specific scenario involving children around a table playing together with toys. Datasets are acquired and annotated by psychologists in Peking university. The experimental results demonstrate the usefulness of the join estimation process to recognize visual focus of attention in middle resolution video sequences.