Visual focus of attention in non-calibrated environments using gaze estimation

Estimating the focus of attention of a person highly depends on her/his gaze directionality. Here, we pro- pose a new method for estimating visual focus of attention using head rotation, as well as fuzzy fusion of head rotation and eye gaze estimates, in a fully automatic manner, with- out the need for any special hardware or a priori knowledge regarding the user, the environment or the setup. Instead, we propose a system aimed at functioning under unpretending conditions, only with the usage of simple hardware, like a normalweb-camera. Our system is aimed at functioning in a human-computer interaction environment, considering a per- son is facing amonitorwith a camera adjusted on top. To this aim, we propose in this paper two novel techniques, based on local and appearance information, estimating head rota- tion, and we adaptively fuse them in a common framework. The system is able to recognize head rotational movement, under translationalmovements of the user towards any direc- tion, without any knowledge or a-priori estimate of the user’s distance from the camera or camera intrinsic parameters.