Anticipation through Head Pose Estimation: a preliminary study

TL;DR

This study explores how head pose estimation can be used as a visual cue to anticipate human action goals, such as reaching and transporting, which is crucial for natural human-robot interactions.

Contribution

It presents a preliminary experiment demonstrating that head pose can be used for short-range anticipation of actions, establishing a foundation for future human-robot interaction applications.

Findings

Head pose provides useful cues for action anticipation.

Short-range anticipation of reaching and transporting movements is feasible.

Foundations laid for future human-robot interaction research.

Abstract

The ability to anticipate others' goals and intentions is at the basis of human-human social interaction. Such ability, largely based on non-verbal communication, is also a key to having natural and pleasant interactions with artificial agents, like robots. In this work, we discuss a preliminary experiment on the use of head pose as a visual cue to understand and anticipate action goals, particularly reaching and transporting movements. By reasoning on the spatio-temporal connections between the head, hands and objects in the scene, we will show that short-range anticipation is possible, laying the foundations for future applications to human-robot interaction.