A robust method for detecting facial orientation in infrared images

This paper studies the problem of determining facial orientation without correspondences in distortion-related infrared images. To improve estimation accuracy and reduce sensitivity to noise and unavoidable error, a simple and robust method based on the single linkage clustering is proposed to simultaneously detect inlier set and estimate orientation angle under contaminated data. An iterative strategy is adopted to avoid random choice of link distance in the single linkage clustering. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method is substantially superior to the moment method. This method can also be extended to detect arbitrary objects with mirror symmetrical or nearly symmetrical property.