Estimating Human Body and Head Orientation Change to Detect Visual Attention Direction

This paper presents a method to estimate human body and head orientation change around yaw axis from low-resolution data. Body orientation is calculated by using Shape Context algorithm to match the outline of upper body with predefined shape templates within the ranges of 22.5 degrees. Then, motion flow vectors of SIFT features around head region are utilized to estimate the change in head orientation. Body orientation change and head orientation change can be added to the initial orientation to compute the new visual focus of attention of the person. Experimental results are presented to prove the effectiveness of the proposed method. Successful estimations, which are supported by a user study, were obtained from low-resolution data under various head pose articulations.