Fast GPU and CPU computing for head position estimation

Abstract

The head movement based control methods in the 3D graphic applications requires the real-time face position estimation. Therefore, the tracking method at the high speed and with the minimal latency is needed. This is especially hard to achieve when the face is tracked with the use of the high resolution video image on mobile devices. In the article, we present several methods for an acceleration of the face position estimation method based on the fuzzy skin color classifier and other color-based face tracking methods. The acceleration is achieved through a highly parallel GPU computation, the precalculation of the classifier weights and through the combined computations on the GPU and the CPU. The achieved computation time is independent of the used skin color classification method, allowing for use of very complex classifiers. The presented methods provides the robust head position tracking on the high resolution video image of 1920×1080 pixels, at 300 frames per second, on the mobile device with a low computing power.