Abstract: This paper presents an automatic 3D head pose initialization scheme for a real-time face tracker with application to human-robot interaction. It has two main contributions. First, we propose an automatic 3D head pose and person specific face shape estimation, based on a 3D deformable model. The proposed approach serves to initialize our realtime 3D face tracker. What makes this contribution very attractive is that the initialization step can cope with faces
under arbitrary pose, so it is not limited only to near-frontal views. Second, the previous framework is used to develop an application in which the orientation of an AIBO’s camera can be controlled through the imitation of user’s head pose.
In our scenario, this application is used to build panoramic images from overlapping snapshots. Experiments on real videos confirm the robustness and usefulness of the proposed methods.