Rapid pose estimation of Mongolian faces using projective geometry

We present a new method to estimate the pose of human head from a monocular image in this paper. The method only uses a face model that formed by five points (four eye-corners and subnasale) in human face, does not need any auxiliary equipment. The estimation involves the research result of the anthropometry in the Mongolian race´s feature we had obtained, and employs the theory of the projective geometry. We divide the pose computation into separate estimation of the orientation about X, Y and Z-axis, respectively. For the automatic detection of these points, active appearance models (AAM) are utilized in our experiment. It had been shown that the results of experiment -were very close with actual rotational angles of human face. Especially when facial rotation in a naturally small angle, less than 30°, we can obtain the approximate accurate value of rotational angles by using this method.