Exploring depth information for head detection with depth images

Head detection may be more demanding than face recognition and pedestrian detection in the scenarios where a face turns away or body parts are occluded in the view of a sensor, but locating people is needed. In this paper, we introduce an efficient head detection approach for single depth images at low computational expense. First, a novel head descriptor is developed and used to classify pixels as head or non-head. We use depth values to guide each window size, to eliminate false positives of head centers, and to cluster head pixels, which significantly reduce the computation costs of searching for appropriate parameters. High head detection performance was achieved in experiments - 90% accuracy for our dataset containing heads with different body postures, head poses, and distances to a Kinect2 sensor, and above 70% precision on a public dataset composed of a few daily activities, which is higher than using a head-shoulder detector with HOG feature for depth images.