  Estimating the head pose of a person is a crucial problem that has a large
amount of applications such as aiding in gaze estimation, modeling attention,
fitting 3D models to video and performing face alignment. Traditionally head
pose is computed by estimating some keypoints from the target face and solving
the 2D to 3D correspondence problem with a mean human head model. We argue that
this is a fragile method because it relies entirely on landmark detection
performance, the extraneous head model and an ad-hoc fitting step. We present
an elegant and robust way to determine pose by training a multi-loss
convolutional neural network on 300W-LP, a large synthetically expanded
dataset, to predict intrinsic Euler angles (yaw, pitch and roll) directly from
image intensities through joint binned pose classification and regression. We
present empirical tests on common in-the-wild pose benchmark datasets which
show state-of-the-art results. Additionally we test our method on a dataset
usually used for pose estimation using depth and start to close the gap with
state-of-the-art depth pose methods. We open-source our training and testing
code as well as release our pre-trained models.
