Pose-insensitive nose detection in TOF-scans

One of the fundamental benefits of 3D range data as opposed to 2D Images is the pose invariance of 3D geometrical information Time-of-flight (TOF) cameras provide such range data at a high temporal but so far only at a medium spatial resolution We present an algorithm to detect the tip of the nose in TOF range data where the subjects head pose varies between -90 degrees and 90 degrees around the vertical axis (yaw) and between -30 degrees and 30 degrees in pitch rotation The main idea is to rotate the head around a virtual head axis and extract the silhouettes for all rotations in 5 degrees steps To find the correct rotation and the tip of the nose we compare these extracted silhouettes to an average head profile template which was calculated from 200 high resolution laser-scans In a test set of 120 TOF scans of 10 different persons the detected nose tip was within 10 mm from the correct position in 89% and within 25 mm in 97 5% of the cases (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc All rights reserved