A Framework for Real-Time Face and Facial Feature Tracking using Optical Flow Pre-estimation and Template Tracking

Abstract: This work presents a framework for tracking head movements and capturing the movements of the mouth and both the eyebrows in real-time. We present a head tracker which is a combination of a optical flow and a template based tracker. The estimation of the optical flow head tracker is used as starting point for the template tracker which fine-tunes the head estimation. This approach together with re-updating the optical flow points prevents the head tracker from drifting. This combination together with our switching scheme, makes our tracker very robust against fast movement and motion-blur. We also propose a way to reduce the influence of partial occlusion of the head. In both the optical flow and the template based tracker we identify and exclude occluded points.