Fast and accurate facial pose estimation by aligning a 3D appearance model

This paper proposed a method to estimate pose including large rotation in depth by aligning the 3D appearance model with the target image captured under various illumination conditions. Pose estimation is formulated by the minimization of the error between the target image and an image reproduced by the model. In the experiments, the performances of our proposed method for static and realtime pose estimation has been evaluated with test images including pose variations up to 60 degrees even from frontal and drastic illumination variations. It has shown that the proposed method is fast enough.