Determining pose of a human face from a single monocular image

Abstract

A new approach for estimating 3D head pose form a monocular image is proposed. Our approach employs general prior knowledge of face structure and the corresponding geometrical constraints provided by the location of vanishing point to determine pose of human faces. Eye-lines and mouth-line are assumed parallel in 3D space, and the vanishing point formed by the intersection of the eyeline and mouth-line in the image can be used to infer 3D orientation and location of human face. Perspective invariance of cross ratio and harmonic range is used to locate the vanishing point stably. The robustness analysis of the algorithm with synthesis data and real face images are enclosed.