Evaluating multi-task learning for multi-view head-pose classification in interactive environments

Social attention behavior offers vital cues towards inferring one's personality traits from interactive settings such as round-table meetings and cocktail parties. Head orientation is typically employed as a proxy for determining the social attention direction when faces are captured at low-resolution. Recently, multi-task learning has been proposed to robustly compute head pose under perspective and scale-based facial appearance variations when multiple, distant and large field-of-view cameras are employed for visual analysis in smart-room applications. In this paper, we evaluate the effectiveness of an SVM-based MTL (SVM+MTL) framework with various facial descriptors (KL, HOG, LBP, etc.). The KL+HOG feature combination is found to produce the best classification performance, with SVM+MTL outperforming classical SVM irrespective of the feature used.