DriveAHead — A Large-Scale Driver Head Pose Dataset

Head pose monitoring is an important task for driver assistance systems, since it is a key indicator for human attention and behavior. However, current head pose datasets either lack complexity or do not adequately represent the conditions that occur while driving. Therefore, we introduce DriveAHead, a novel dataset designed to develop and evaluate head pose monitoring algorithms in real driving conditions. We provide frame-by-frame head pose labels obtained from a motion-capture system, as well as annotations about occlusions of the driver's face. To the best of our knowledge, DriveAHead is the largest publicly available driver head pose dataset, and also the only one that provides 2D and 3D data aligned at the pixel level using the Kinect v2. Existing performance metrics are based on the mean error without any consideration of the bias towards one position or another. Here, we suggest a new performance metric, named Balanced Mean Angular Error, that addresses the bias towards the forward looking position existing in driving datasets. Finally, we present the Head Pose Network, a deep learning model that achieves better performance than current state-of-the-art algorithms, and we analyze its performance when using our dataset.