Archive for March, 2010
Quick and Easy Head Pose Estimation with OpenCV [w/ code]

Update: check out my new post about this http://www.morethantechnical.com/2012/10/17/head-pose-estimation-with-opencv-opengl-revisited-w-code/
Hi
Just wanted to share a small thing I did with OpenCV - Head Pose Estimation (sometimes known as Gaze Direction Estimation). Many people try to achieve this and there are a ton of papers covering it, including a recent overview of almost all known methods.
I implemented a very quick & dirty solution based on OpenCV's internal methods that produced surprising results (I expected it to fail), so I decided to share. It is based on 3D-2D point correspondence and then fitting of the points to the 3D model. OpenCV provides a magical method - solvePnP - that does this, given some calibration parameters that I completely disregarded.
Here's how it's done
Implementing PTAM: stereo, tracking and pose estimation for AR with OpenCV [w/ code]
Been working hard at a project for school the past month, implementing one of the more interesting works I've seen in the AR arena: Parallel Tracking and Mapping (PTAM) [PDF]. This is a work by George Klein [homepage] and David Murray from Oxford university, presented in ISMAR 2007.
When I first saw it on youtube [link] I immediately saw the immense potential - mobile markerless augmented reality. I thought I should get to know this work a bit more closely, so I chose to implement it as a part of advanced computer vision course, given by Dr. Lior Wolf [link] at TAU.
The work is very extensive, and clearly is a result of deep research in the field, so I set to achieve a few selected features: Stereo initialization, Tracking, and small map upkeeping. I chose not to implement relocalization and full map handling.
This post is kind of a tutorial for 3D reconstruction with OpenCV 2.0. I will show practical use of the functions in cvtriangulation.cpp, which are not documented and in fact incomplete. Furthermore I'll show how to easily combine OpenCV and OpenGL for 3D augmentations, a thing which is only briefly described in the docs or online.
Here are the step I took and things I learned in the process of implementing the work.
Update: A nice patch by yazor fixes the video mismatching - thanks! and also a nice application by Zentium called "iKat" is doing some kick-ass mobile markerless augmented reality.
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