Real-Time Face Pose Estimation

I just posted the next version of dlib, v18.10, and it includes a number of new minor features.  The main addition in this release is an implementation of an excellent paper from this year's Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference:

One Millisecond Face Alignment with an Ensemble of Regression Trees by Vahid Kazemi and Josephine Sullivan

As the name suggests, it allows you to perform face pose estimation very quickly. In particular, this means that if you give it an image of someone's face it will add this kind of annotation:

In fact, this is the output of dlib's new face landmarking example program on one of the images from the HELEN dataset.  To get an even better idea of how well this pose estimator works take a look at this video where it has been applied to each frame:

It doesn't just stop there though.  You can use this technique to make your own custom pose estimation models.  To see how, take a look at the example program for training these pose estimation models.