Fast, Reliable Head Tracking under Varying Illumination

An improved technique for 3D head tracking under varying illumination conditions is proposed. The head is modeled as a texture mapped cylinder. Tracking is formulated as an image registration problem in the cylinder's texture map image. To solve the registration problem in the presence of lighting variation and head motion, the residual error of registration is modeled as a linear combination of texture warping templates and orthogonal illumination templates. Fast and stable on-line tracking is then achieved via regularized, weighted least squares minimization of the registration error. The regularization term tends to limit potential ambiguities that arise in the warping and illumination templates. It enables stable tracking over extended sequences. Tracking does not require a precise initial fit of the model; the system is initialized automatically using a simple 2-D face detector. The only assumption is that the target is facing the camera in the first frame of the sequence. The warping templates are computed at the first frame of the sequence. Illumination templates are precomputed off-line over a training set of face images collected under varying lighting conditions. Experiments in tracking are reported.

Office of Naval Research (Young Investigator Award N00014-96-1-0661); National Science Foundation (IIS-9624168, EIA-9623865)