# Towards Real-Time Head Pose Estimation: Exploring Parameter-Reduced Residual Networks on In-the-wild Datasets

## TL;DR

This paper develops parameter-reduced Residual Networks for real-time head pose estimation, maintaining accuracy while enabling fast inference on in-the-wild datasets for human-computer interaction applications.

## Contribution

It introduces modified ResNets with fewer parameters that achieve state-of-the-art accuracy and real-time performance in head pose estimation.

## Key findings

- Reduced ResNets maintain accuracy comparable to larger models.
- Modified ResNets achieve real-time inference speeds.
- Models trained on in-the-wild datasets demonstrate robustness in real-world scenarios.

## Abstract

Head poses are a key component of human bodily communication and thus a decisive element of human-computer interaction. Real-time head pose estimation is crucial in the context of human-robot interaction or driver assistance systems. The most promising approaches for head pose estimation are based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). However, CNN models are often too complex to achieve real-time performance. To face this challenge, we explore a popular subgroup of CNNs, the Residual Networks (ResNets) and modify them in order to reduce their number of parameters. The ResNets are modifed for different image sizes including low-resolution images and combined with a varying number of layers. They are trained on in-the-wild datasets to ensure real-world applicability. As a result, we demonstrate that the performance of the ResNets can be maintained while reducing the number of parameters. The modified ResNets achieve state-of-the-art accuracy and provide fast inference for real-time applicability.