Real-time 3D head tracking under rapidly changing pose, head movement and illumination

Abstract

This paper proposes a fast 3D head tracking method that is working robustly under a variety of difficult conditions such as the rapidly changing pose, head movement and illumination. First, we obtain the pose robustness by using the 3D cylindrical head model (CHM) and dynamic template. Second, we also obtain the robustness about the fast head movement by using the dynamic template. Third, we obtain the illumination robustness by modeling the illumination basis vectors and by adding them to the previous input image to adapt the current input image. Additionally, to make it more robust, we use a re-registration technique that takes the stored reference image as the template when the registration error becomes great. Experimental results show that the proposed head tracking method outperforms the other tracking method using the fixed and dynamic template in terms of the small pose error and the higher successful tracking rate and it tracks the head successfully even if the head moves fast under the rapidly changing poses and illuminations in a speed of 10-15 frames/sec. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.