Evaluation of Various State of the Art Head Pose Estimation Algorithms for Clinical Scenarios

Head pose assessment can reveal important clinical information on human motor control. Quantitative assessment have the potential to objectively evaluate head pose and movements' specifics, in order to monitor the progression of a disease or the effectiveness of a treatment. Optoelectronic camera-based motion-capture systems, recognized as a gold standard in clinical biomechanics, have been proposed for head pose estimation. However, these systems require markers to be positioned on the person's face which is impractical for everyday clinical practice. Furthermore, the limited access to this type of equipment and the emerging trend to assess mobility in natural environments support the development of algorithms capable of estimating head orientation using off-the-shelf sensors, such as RGB cameras. Although artificial vision is a popular field of research, limited validation of human pose estimation based on image recognition suitable for clinical applications has been performed. This paper first provides a brief review of available head pose estimation algorithms in the literature. Current state-of-the-art head pose algorithms designed to capture the facial geometry from videos, OpenFace 2.0, MediaPipe and 3DDFA_V2, are then further evaluated and compared. Accuracy is assessed by comparing both approaches to a baseline, measured with an optoelectronic camera-based motion-capture system. Results reveal a mean error lower or equal to 5.6 degrees for 3DDFA_V2 depending on the plane of movement, while the mean error reaches 14.1 degrees and 11.0 degrees for OpenFace 2.0 and MediaPipe, respectively. This demonstrates the superiority of the 3DDFA_V2 algorithm in estimating head pose, in different directions of motion, and suggests that this algorithm can be used in clinical scenarios.