Determination of face position and pose with a learned representation based on labelled graphs

We present a new system for the automatic determination of the position, size and pose of the head of a human figure in a camera image. The system is an extension of the well-known face recognition system [15] to pose estimation. The pose estimation system is characterized by a certain reliability and speed. We improve this performance and speed with the help of statistical estimation methods. In order to make these applicable, we reduce the originally very high dimensionality of our system with the help of a number of a priori principles. We discuss a possible extension of the learning algorithm aiming an autonomous object recognition system at the end of the paper. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.