Horizontal human face pose determination using pupils and skin region positions

Abstract

This paper describes a novel real-time technique to determine horizontal human face pose from a video color sequence. The idea underlying this technique is that when head is at an arbitrary pose to the right or left, there are significant relationships between the distance from center of both pupils to head center, and the distance between both pupils. From these distances, we compute a ratio known as "horizontal ratio". This ratio, besides being advantageous in the sense that it reduces the dependency on facial features tracking accuracy and robust to noise, is actually the quantity that is used to determine the horizontal human face pose. The technique is simple, computational cheap and requires only information that is usually retrievable from a face and facial feature tracker. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.