A Combined Generalized and Subject-Specific 3D Head Pose Estimation

We propose a real-time method for 3D head pose estimation from RGB-D sequences. Our algorithm relies on a Random Forest framework that is able to regress the head pose at every frame in a temporal tracking manner. Such framework is learned once from a generic dataset of 3D head models and refined online to adapt the forest to the specific characteristics of each subject. Through the qualitative experiments under different conditions, it demonstrates remarkable properties in terms of robustness to occlusions, computational efficiency and capacity of handling a variety of challenging head poses. In addition, it also outperforms the state of the art on the reference benchmark dataset with regards to the accuracy of the estimated head poses.