Ear tracking

[baolin_s_]

Hi,

I'm playing around RealSense F200 (mostly unity samples). It seems RealSense SDK doesn't provide built-in ear tracking support like they did for hand and face. Has anyone tried something like this?

[manish_k_2]

Yup, even i can't find out but if it is just about positioning it then we can do it by having some assumptions like X co-ordinate can be decided by adding/deducting some value to eyebrows end position and Y can be thought as nose tip's Y co-ordinate. Not sure if it helps you.

[baolin_s_]

@manish, thanks. Your suggestion doesn't really work for me because I need quite precise tracking. I also saw your question about detecting shoulders. I didn't find any reference about how to implement custom feature detection/tracking using SDK ... 

[manish_k_2]

@baolin: Yup even i had same problem but i got settled with approximate ones. I had another idea of blob, may be u can get the extreme left and right point of head using blobs. Ear being the extremes of face may help u. Not sure if we can do more precise tracking than this with F200. 

[baolin_s_]

Thanks for the idea. I will play around with it and let you know whether it works. In theory, I can't think of why precise ear tracking would be more difficult than nose/lips etc. I will also look into the sample and see how we could build something like this.

[MartyG]

Side-on features such as the ears are harder for the camera to see than front-on ones.  An example of this is with the hands - it's hard to maintain tracking of the hand when it is turned side-on unless you are tracking landmarks that are more visible to the camera in that orientation, such as fingertips and the wrist joint.  Also, a lot of people would have their ears naturally covered up by their hair, which RealSense would have difficulty seeing through (beards can also reduce tracking efficiency).

I remembered that Intel had released a chart of landmark points, so I tracked that down.  Interestingly, the camera does look at landmark points right beside each ear (points 53-55 and 67-69 on the chart).

https://software.intel.com/sites/landingpage/realsense/camera-sdk/v1.1/documentation/html/index.html?manuals_face_landmark_data.html

The QueryPoint scripting function allows you to query an individual point on the face.

https://software.intel.com/sites/landingpage/realsense/camera-sdk/v1.1/documentation/html/querypoint_landmarksdata_pxcfacedata.html