3D Head Pose Estimation Enhanced Through SURF-Based Key-Frames

This work presents a method that incorporates 2D and 3D cues for the estimation of head pose. We propose the use of the concept of Key-Frames (KF), a set of frames where the position and orientation of the head is automatically calculated off-line, to improve the precision of pose estimation and detection rate. Each KF consists of: 2D information, encoded by SURF descriptors; 3D information from a depth image (both acquired by an RGB-D sensor); and a generic 3D model that corresponds to the head localization and orientation in the real world. Our algorithm compares a new frame against all KFs and selects the most relevant one. The 3D transformation between both, selected KF and current frame, can be estimated using the depth image and the Iterative Closest Point algorithm in an online framework. Compared to reference approaches, our system can handle partial occlusions and extreme rotations even with noisy depth data. We evaluate the proposal using two challenging datasets: (1) an dataset acquired by us where the ground-truth information is given by a commercial Motion Capture system and (2) the public benchmark Biwi Kinect Head Pose Database.