# Towards Robust and Unconstrained Full Range of Rotation Head Pose Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.07654 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07654/

## Key facts

- Cited by 20 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [On the Continuity of Rotation Representations in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07035/) (2018)
- [Joint Face Detection and Alignment using Multi-task Cascaded Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02878/) (2016)
- [Albumentations: fast and flexible image augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.06839/) (2018)
- [How far are we from solving the 2D & 3D Face Alignment problem? (and a dataset of 230,000 3D facial landmarks)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07332/) (2017)
- [Fine-Grained Head Pose Estimation Without Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.00925/) (2017)
- [HyperFace: A Deep Multi-task Learning Framework for Face Detection, Landmark Localization, Pose Estimation, and Gender Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.01249/) (2016)
- [6D Rotation Representation For Unconstrained Head Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12555/) (2022)
- [img2pose: Face Alignment and Detection via 6DoF, Face Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07791/) (2020)
- [WHENet: Real-time Fine-Grained Estimation for Wide Range Head Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10353/) (2020)
- [A Vector-based Representation to Enhance Head Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07184/) (2020)
- [VariTex: Variational Neural Face Textures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05988/) (2021)
- [Multi-task head pose estimation in-the-wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02299/) (2022)
- [FacePoseNet: Making a Case for Landmark-Free Face Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07517/) (2017)
- [POSEidon: Face-from-Depth for Driver Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.10195/) (2016)
- [Robust Facial Landmark Detection under Significant Head Poses and Occlusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.08127/) (2017)
- [RankPose: Learning Generalised Feature with Rank Supervision for Head Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10984/) (2020)
- [Facial Pose Estimation by Deep Learning from Label Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.13102/) (2019)
- [Two-stage Convolutional Part Heatmap Regression for the 1st 3D Face Alignment in the Wild (3DFAW) Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.09545/) (2016)
- [Nose, eyes and ears: Head pose estimation by locating facial keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00739/) (2018)
- [Estimation of Driver's Gaze Region from Head Position and Orientation using Probabilistic Confidence Regions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12754/) (2020)
- [Simultaneous face detection and 360 degree headpose estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11604/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Vec2Face: Scaling Face Dataset Generation with Loosely Constrained Vectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02979/) (2024)
- [AvatarArtist: Open-Domain 4D Avatarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19906/) (2025)
- [E-3DGS: Event-Based Novel View Rendering of Large-Scale Scenes Using 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10827/) (2025)
- [ID-Booth: Identity-consistent Face Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07392/) (2025)
- [Social 3D Scene Graphs: Modeling Human Actions and Relations for Interactive Service Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24966/) (2025)
- [VGGHeads: 3D Multi Head Alignment with a Large-Scale Synthetic Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18245/) (2024)
- [MagicPortrait: Temporally Consistent Face Reenactment with 3D Geometric Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.21497/) (2025)
- [Agreeing to Interact in Human-Robot Interaction using Large Language Models and Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15491/) (2025)
- [Plan-and-Act using Large Language Models for Interactive Agreement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01252/) (2025)
- [Vec2Face+ for Face Dataset Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.17192/) (2025)
- [AvatarPointillist: AutoRegressive 4D Gaussian Avatarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04787/) (2026)
- [Location-guided Head Pose Estimation for Fisheye Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18320/) (2024)
- [On the power of data augmentation for head pose estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05357/) (2024)
- [Bidirectional Regression for Monocular 6DoF Head Pose Estimation and Reference System Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14136/) (2024)
- [CLERF: Contrastive LEaRning for Full Range Head Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02066/) (2024)
- [Cascaded Multi-Scale Attention for Enhanced Multi-Scale Feature Extraction and Interaction with Low-Resolution Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02197/) (2024)
- [Data extraction and processing methods to aid the study of driving behaviors at intersections in naturalistic driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05487/) (2025)
- [NLML-HPE: Head Pose Estimation with Limited Data via Manifold Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18429/) (2025)
- [Bitbox: Behavioral Imaging Toolbox for Computational Analysis of Behavior from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.17655/) (2025)
- [Diff-PC: Identity-preserving and 3D-aware Controllable Diffusion for Zero-shot Portrait Customization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00639/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Estimating the head pose of a person is a crucial problem for numerous applications that is yet mainly addressed as a subtask of frontal pose prediction. We present a novel method for unconstrained end-to-end head pose estimation to tackle the challenging task of full range of orientation head pose prediction. We address the issue of ambiguous rotation labels by introducing the rotation matrix formalism for our ground truth data and propose a continuous 6D rotation matrix representation for efficient and robust direct regression. This allows to efficiently learn full rotation appearance and to overcome the limitations of the current state-of-the-art. Together with new accumulated training data that provides full head pose rotation data and a geodesic loss approach for stable learning, we design an advanced model that is able to predict an extended range of head orientations. An extensive evaluation on public datasets demonstrates that our method significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in an efficient and robust manner, while its advanced prediction range allows the expansion of the application area. We open-source our training and testing code along with our trained models: https://github.com/thohemp/6DRepNet360.