Siamese PointNet: 3D Head Pose Estimation with Local Feature Descriptor

Head pose estimation is an important part of the field of face analysis technology. It can be applied to driver attention monitoring, passenger monitoring, effective information screening, etc. However, illumination changes and partial occlusion interfere with the task, and due to the non-stationary characteristic of the head pose change process, normal regression networks are unable to achieve very accurate results on large-scale synthetic training data. To address the above problems, a Siamese network based on 3D point clouds was proposed, which adopts a share weight network with similar pose samples to constrain the regression process of the pose's angles; meanwhile, a local feature descriptor was introduced to describe the local geometric features of the objects. In order to verify the performance of our method, we conducted experiments on two public datasets: the Biwi Kinect Head Pose dataset and Pandora. The results show that compared with the latest methods, our standard deviation was reduced by 0.4, and the mean error was reduced by 0.1; meanwhile, our network also maintained a good real-time performance.