Real time head nod and shake detection using HMMs

Abstract

This paper discusses a technique of detecting a head nod and shake. The proposed system is composed of face detection, eye detection and head nod and head shake detection. We use motion segmentation algorithm that makes use of differencing to detect moving people's faces. The novelty of this paper comes from the differencing in real time input images, preprocessing to remove noises (morphological operator and so on), detecting edge lines and restoration, finding the face area and cutting the head candidate. Moreover, we adopt K-means algorithm for finding head. Eye detection extracts the location of eyes from the detected face region. It is performed at the region close to a pair of eyes for real-time eye detecting. Head nod and shake can be detected by HMMs those are adapted by a directional vector. The HMMs vector can also be used to determine neutral as well as head nod and head shake. These techniques are implemented on a lot of images and a notable success is notified. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.