Face-from-Depth for Head Pose Estimation on Depth Images

Depth cameras allow to set up reliable solutions for people monitoring and behavior understanding, especially when unstable or poor illumination conditions make unusable common RGB sensors. Therefore, we propose a complete framework for the estimation of the head and shoulder pose based on depth images only. A head detection and localization module is also included, in order to develop a complete end-to-end system. The core element of the framework is a Convolutional Neural Network, called POSEidon$^+$mml:mathmml:msupmml:mrow/mml:mo+, that receives as input three types of images and provides the 3D angles of the pose as output. Moreover, a Face-from-Depth component based on a Deterministic Conditional GAN model is able to hallucinate a face from the corresponding depth image. We empirically demonstrate that this positively impacts the system performances. We test the proposed framework on two public datasets, namely Biwi Kinect Head Pose and ICT-3DHP, and on Pandora, a new challenging dataset mainly inspired by the automotive setup. Experimental results show that our method overcomes several recent state-of-art works based on both intensity and depth input data, running in real-time at more than 30 frames per second.