Benfold, B.Reid, I.2014-08-112014-08-112009Proceedings of the British Machine Vision Conference, 7-10 September 2009 / A. Cavallaro, S. Prince and D. Alexander (eds.): pp.14.1-14.111901725391http://hdl.handle.net/2440/84358We describe a novel method for directing the attention of an automated surveillance system. Our starting premise is that the attention of people in a scene can be used as an indicator of interesting areas and events. To determine people’s attention from passive visual observations we develop a system for automatic tracking and detection of individual heads to infer their gaze direction. The former is achieved by combining a histogram of oriented gradient (HOG) based head detector with frame-to-frame tracking using multiple point features to provide stable head images. The latter is achieved using a head pose classification method which uses randomised ferns with decision branches based on both HOG and colour based features to determine a coarse gaze direction for each person in the scene. By building both static and temporally varying maps of areas where people look we are able to identify interesting regions.en© 2009 The AuthorsConference paper002013121910.5244/C.23.142-s2.0-8489884805318413Reid, I. [0000-0001-7790-6423]