Vision for Intelligent Vehicles & Applications (VIVA): Face Detection and Head Pose Challenge

Intelligent vehicles of the future are that which, having a holistic (i.e. inside and outside the vehicle) perception and understanding of the driving environment, make it possible for passengers to go from point A to point B safely and in a timely manner. This may happen by way of providing active assistance for drivers, giving full control to automated cars or some combination of the two. No matter how, a holistic perception and understanding of inside and outside the vehicle is absolutely necessary, and vision based techniques are expected to play an increasing role in this holistic view. The question is, how well do these vision techniques work in order to be used in time and safety critical driving situations? We introduce one part of the Vision for Intelligent Vehicles and Applications (VIVA), the face challenge. VIVA is a platform designed to share naturalistic driving data with the community in order to: present issues and challenges in vision from real-world driving conditions, benchmark existing vision approaches using proper metrics and progress the development of future vision algorithms. With a special focus on challenges from looking inside at the driver’s face, this articles provides information on how the data is acquired and annotated, and how methods are compared.