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Head pose estimation (HPE) notoriously represents a crucial task for many computer vision applications in robotics, biometry and video surveillance. While, in general, HPE can be performed on both still images and frames extracted from live video or captured footage, its functional approach and the related processing pipeline may have a significant impact on suitability to different application contexts. This implies that, for any real‐time application in which HPE is required, this information, namely the angular value of yaw, pitch and roll axes, should be provided in real‐time as well. Since, so far, the primary aim in HPE research has been on improving estimation accuracy, there are only a few works reporting the computing time of the proposed HPE method and even less explicitly addressing it. The present work stems from a previous Partitioned Iterated Function Systems‐based approach providing state‐of‐the‐art accuracy with high computing cost, and improve it by means of two regression models, namely Gradient Boosting Regressor and Extreme Gradient Boosting Regressor, achieving much faster response and an even lower mean absolute error on the yaw and roll axis, as shown by experiments conducted on the BIWI and AFLW2000 datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Head pose estimation (HPE) represents a topic central to many relevant research fields and characterized by a wide application range. In particular, HPE performed using a singular RGB frame is particular suitable to be applied at best-frame-selection problems. This explains a growing interest witnessed by a large number of contributions, most of which exploit deep learning architectures and require extensive training sessions to achieve accuracy and robustness in estimating head rotations on three axes. However, methods alternative to machine learning approaches could be capable of similar if not better performance. To this regard, we present FASHE, an approach based on partitioned iterated function systems (PIFS) to represent auto-similarities within face image through a contractive affine function transforming the domain blocks extracted only once by a single frontal reference image, in a good approximation of the range blocks which the target image has been partitioned into. Pose estimation is achieved by finding the closest match between fractal code of target image and a reference array by means of Hamming distance. The results of experiments conducted exceed the state of the art on both Biwi and Ponting’04 datasets as well as approaching those of the best performing methods on the challenging AFLW2000 database. In addition, the applications to GOTCHA Video Dataset demonstrate that FASHE successfully operates in-the-wild. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]