DS-HPE: Deep Set for Head Pose Estimation

Head pose estimation is a critical task that is fundamental to a variety of real-world applications, such as virtual and augmented reality, as well as human behavior analysis. In the past, facial landmark-based methods were the dominant approach to head pose estimation. However, recent research has demonstrated the effectiveness of landmark-free methods, which have achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) results. In this study, we utilize the Deep Set architecture for the first time in the domain of head pose estimation. Deep Set is a specialized architecture that works on a "set" of data as a result of the "permutation-invariance" operator being utilized in the model. As a result, the model is a simple yet powerful and edge-computation-friendly method for estimating head pose. We evaluate our proposed method on two benchmark data sets, and we compare our method against SOTA methods on a challenging video-based data set. Our results indicate that our proposed method not only achieves comparable accuracy to these SOTA methods but also requires less computational time. Furthermore, the simplicity of our proposed method allows for its deployment in resource-constrained environments without the need for expensive hardware such as Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). This work underscores the importance of accurate and resource-efficient head pose estimation in the fields of computer vision and human-computer interaction, and the Deep Set architecture presents a promising approach to achieving this goal.