Detecting human heads with their orientations

We propose a two-step method for detecting human heads with their orientations. In the first step, the method employs an ellipse as the contour model of human-head appearances to deal with wide variety of appearances. Our method then evaluates the ellipse to detect possible human heads. In the second step, on the other hand, our method focuses on features inside the ellipse, such as eyes, the mouth or cheeks, to model facial components. The method evaluates not only such components themselves but also their geometric configuration to eliminate false positives in the first step and, at the same time, to estimate face orientations. Our intensive experiments show that our method can correctly and stably detect human heads with their orientations