Int J Comput Vis DOI 10.1007/s11263-013-0691-3 Visual Focus of Attention in Non-calibrated Environments using Gaze Estimation

Abstract Estimating the focus of attention of a person highly depends on her/his gaze directionality. Here, we pro-pose a new method for estimating visual focus of attention using head rotation, as well as fuzzy fusion of head rotation and eye gaze estimates, in a fully automatic manner, with-out the need for any special hardware or a priori knowledge regarding the user, the environment or the setup. Instead, we propose a system aimed at functioning under unpretending conditions, only with the usage of simple hardware, like a normal web-camera. Our system is aimed at functioning in a human-computer interaction environment, considering a per-son is facing a monitor with a camera adjusted on top. To this aim, we propose in this paper two novel techniques, based on local and appearance information, estimating head rota-tion, and we adaptively fuse them in a common framework. The system is able to recognize head rotational movement, under translational movements of the user towards any direc-tion, without any knowledge or a-priori estimate of the user’s distance from the camera or camera intrinsic parameters