Novel Backprojection Method for Monocular Head Pose Estimation

Estimating a driver’s head pose is an important task in driver-assistance systems because it can provide information about where a driver is looking, thereby giving useful cues about the status of the driver (i.e., paying proper attention, fatigued, etc.). This study proposes a system for estimating the head pose using monocular images, which includes a novel use of backprojection. The system can use a single image to estimate a driver’s head pose at a particular time stamp, or an image sequence to support the analysis of a driver’s status. Using our proposed system, we compared two previous pose estimation approaches. We introduced an approach for providing ground-truth reference data using a mannequin model. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system provides relatively accurate estimations of the yaw, tilt, and roll angle. The results also show that one of the pose estimation approaches (perspective-n-point, PnP) provided a consistently better estimate compared to the other (pose from orthography and scaling with iterations, POSIT) using our proposed system.