Estimating gaze direction from low-resolution faces in video

  • Authors:
  • Neil Robertson;Ian Reid

  • Affiliations:
  • QinetiQ, Malvern, UK;Dept. Engineering Science, Oxford University, Oxford, UK

  • Venue:
  • ECCV'06 Proceedings of the 9th European conference on Computer Vision - Volume Part II
  • Year:
  • 2006

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

In this paper we describe a new method for automatically estimating where a person is looking in images where the head is typically in the range 20 to 40 pixels high. We use a feature vector based on skin detection to estimate the orientation of the head, which is discretised into 8 different orientations, relative to the camera. A fast sampling method returns a distribution over previously-seen head-poses. The overall body pose relative to the camera frame is approximated using the velocity of the body, obtained via automatically-initiated colour-based tracking in the image sequence. We show that, by combining direction and head-pose information gaze is determined more robustly than using each feature alone. We demonstrate this technique on surveillance and sports footage.