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An effective head pose estimation approach using Lie Algebrized Gaussians based face representation

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Abstract

The accuracy of head pose estimation is significant for many computer vision applications such as face recognition, driver attention detection and human-computer interaction. Most appearance-based head pose estimation works typically extract the low-dimensional face appearance features in some statistic subspaces, where the subspaces represent the underlying geometry structure of the pose space. However, there is an open problem, namely, how to effectively represent appearance-based subspace face for the head pose estimation problem. To address the problem, this paper proposes a head pose estimation approach based on the Lie Algebrized Gaussians (LAG) feature to model the pose characteristic. LAG is built on Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM), which actually not only models the distribution of local appearance features, but also captures the Lie group manifold structure of the feature space. Moreover, to keep multi-resolution structure information, LAG is operated on many subregions of the image. As a result, these properties of LAG enable it to effectively model the structure of subspace face which can lead to powerful discriminative ability for head pose estimation. After representing subspace face using the LAG, we treat the head pose estimation as a classification problem. The within-class covariance normalization (WCCN) based Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier is employed to achieve robust performance as WCCN could reduce the within-class variabilities of the same pose. Extensive experimental analysis and comparison with both traditional and state-of-the-art algorithms on two challenging benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

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Acknowledgements

Thank the editors and the anonymous referees for their valuable comments. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant number 61073094 and U1233119. The authors would also like to thank Xinwei Jiang for his help.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430074, China

    Chunlong Hu, Tianjiang Wang, Fang Liu & Qi Feng

  2. Eedoo Inc, Beijing, 100085, China

    Liyu Gong

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  1. Chunlong Hu
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  2. Liyu Gong
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  3. Tianjiang Wang
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  4. Fang Liu
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  5. Qi Feng
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Correspondence to Qi Feng.

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Hu, C., Gong, L., Wang, T. et al. An effective head pose estimation approach using Lie Algebrized Gaussians based face representation. Multimed Tools Appl 73, 1863–1884 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-013-1676-5

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