Pose determination of human faces by using vanishing points

A new method for estimating 3D-head pose from a monocular image is proposed in this paper. The 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. The connection of the two far-eye corners and the two neighboring-eye corners, respectively, form the eye-lines. Connecting the two far-mouth corners forms the mouth-line. The eye-lines and the mouth-line are assumed parallel in 3D space, and their vanishing point on the image plane can be used to infer 3D pose of the human face. Perspective projection imaging model is used and an accurate analytic solution of pose (position and orientation) of human face is deduced. The orientation of the facial plane can be obtained when the ratio of the lengths of the eye-line segment (far-eye corners) and the mouth-line segment (far-mouth corners) is known. Furthermore, if one of the two lengths is known, then the absolute positions of the feature corners can be located. The robustness analysis of the algorithm with synthetic data and the experimental results of real face images are enclosed. (C) 2001 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.