Dense-Hog-based 3D face tracking for infant pain monitoring

This paper presents a new algorithm for 3D face tracking intended for clinical infant pain monitoring under challenging conditions. The algorithm uses a cylinder head model and head pose recovery by alignment of dynamically extracted templates based on dense-HOG features. The algorithm is motivated from the application context and compared with a variant based on intensities. The paper reports experimental results on videos of moving infants in hospital who are relaxed or in pain. Results show good short-term tracking behavior for poses up to 50 degrees from upright-frontal, with significantly higher accuracy resulting from the use of dense-HOG features.