An Algorithm for Real-time Stereo Vision Implementation of Head Pose and Gaze Direction Measurement

To build smart human interfaces, it is necessary for a system to know a user’s intention and point of at-tention. Since the motion of a person’s head pose and gaze direction are deeply related with his/her inten-tion and attention, detection of such information can be utilized to build natural and intuitive interfaces. In this paper, we describe our real-time stereo face tracking and gaze detection system to measure head pose and gaze direction simultaneously. The key as-pect of our system is the use of real-time stereo vision together with a simple algorithm which is suitable for real-time processing. Since the 3D coordinates of the features on a face can be directly measured in our sys-tem, we can significantly simplify the algorithm for 3D model fitting to obtain the full 3D pose of the head compared with conventional systems that use monoc-ular camera. Consequently we achieved a non-contact, passive, real-time, robust, accurate and compact mea-surement system for head pose and gaze direction