Automatic head pose estimation from a single camera using projective geometry

Estimation of human head position and orientation has become an increasingly important issue in human-computer interaction field. Over the last decade, many approaches have been introduced to achieve head pose estimation in both academical and industrial fields, but the low-cost and real-time application still proves to be a difficult task. Motivated by the past researches, we propose an automatic and monocular head pose estimation system. We applied a number of improvements to a direct linear transformation algorithm called Pose from Orthography and Scaling with ITerations (POSIT) and applied it for the head pose estimation. User´s virtual head model is also recovered by analyzing laser scan database and corrected by the head pose. The entire process is completely automatic with no need for users to pre-register for identification or initialize their head position. Experiments on a public dataset show realtime performance with lower errors than previous head pose estimation methods.