3D Human Head Tracking using Hypothesized Polygon Model

Vision based analysis of human action is a fundamental issue for a robot to interact intelligently with a human. We present a technique for 3D human head tracking using stereo camera. We apply the particle filter algorithm to the problem of head tracking in a sequence of depth map received from a stereo camera. Posterior distribution of human head pose is represented by a set of hypothesized polygons. A human head is modeled by polygon mesh which contains statistical color information such as skin or hair color. Head tracking and orientation estimation are solved independently for reduction of the number of particles. Tracking experiments demonstrate the validity of our approach