Determination of Head Pose and Facial Expression from a Single Perspective View by Successive Scaled Orthographic Approximations

Human faces are the main organs for expressing human emotion. In this study, a new iterative approach to analyzing the head pose and the facial expression of a human face from a single image is proposed. The proposed approach extends the concept of successive scaled orthographic approximations, which was used to estimate the pose of a rigid object, to develop a method to estimate the parameters for a non-rigid object, namely, a human face. The implementation of the proposed method is simple; furthermore, no initial guess is required. The convergency property of the proposed method is also analyzed theoretically and experimentally. Experimental results show that the proposed method is robust and has a high percentage of convergency, and thus prove the feasibility of the proposed approach.