Estimating Gaze Direction from Low-Resolution Faces in Video
Conference paper
Abstract
In this paper we describe a new method for automatically estimating where a person is looking in images where the head is typically in the range 20 to 40 pixels high. We use a feature vector based on skin detection to estimate the orientation of the head, which is discretised into 8 different orientations, relative to the camera. A fast sampling method returns a distribution over previously-seen head-poses. The overall body pose relative to the camera frame is approximated using the velocity of the body, obtained via automatically-initiated colour-based tracking in the image sequence. We show that, by combining direction and head-pose information gaze is determined more robustly than using each feature alone. We demonstrate this technique on surveillance and sports footage.
Keywords
Skin Detection British Machine Vision Skin Pixel Body Direction Head Pose
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