GADS: A Super Lightweight Model for Head Pose Estimation

In human-computer interaction, head pose estimation profoundly influences application functionality. Although utilizing facial landmarks is valuable for this purpose, existing landmark-based methods prioritize precision over simplicity and model size, limiting their deployment on edge devices and in compute-poor environments. To bridge this gap, we propose Grouped Attention Deep Sets (GADS), a novel architecture based on the Deep Set framework. By grouping landmarks into regions and employing small Deep Set layers, we reduce computational complexity. Our multihead attention mechanism extracts and combines inter-group information, resulting in a model that is 7.5× smaller and executes 25× faster than the current lightest state-of-the-art model. Notably, our method achieves an impressive reduction, being 4321× smaller than the best-performing model. We introduce vanilla GADS and Hybrid-GADS (landmarks + RGB) and evaluate our models on three benchmark datasets -- AFLW2000, BIWI, and 300W-LP. We envision our architecture as a robust baseline for resource-constrained head pose estimation methods.