Face pose estimation and tracking using automatic 3D model construction

This paper presents a method for robustly tracking and estimating the face pose of a person in both indoor and outdoor environments. The method is invariant to identity and that does not require previous training. A face model is automatically initialized and constructed on-line, when the face is frontal to the stereo camera system. To build the model, a fixed point distribution is superposed over the frontal face, and several appropriate points close to those locations are chosen for tracking. Using the stereo correspondence of the two cameras, the 3D coordinates of these points are extracted, and the 3D model is created. RANSAC and POSIT are used for tracking and 3D pose calculation at each frame. The approach runs in real time, and has been tested on sequences recorded in the laboratory and in a moving car.