Face alignment is crucial for face recognition and has been widely adopted. However, current practice is too simple and under-explored. There lacks an understanding of how important face alignment is and how it should be performed, for recognition. This work studies these problems and makes two contributions. First, it provides an in-depth and quantitative study of how alignment strength affects recognition accuracy. Our results show that excessive alignment is harmful and an optimal balanced point of alignment is in need. To strike the balance, our second contribution is a novel joint learning approach where alignment learning is controllable with respect to its strength and driven by recognition. Our proposed method is validated by comprehensive experiments on several benchmarks, especially the challenging ones with large pose.
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）
Although deep face recognition has achieved impressive progress in recent years, controversy has arisen regarding discrimination based on skin tone, questioning their deployment into real-world scenarios. In this paper, we aim to systematically and scientifically study this bias from both data and algorithm aspects. First, using the dermatologist approved Fitzpatrick Skin Type classification system and Individual Typology Angle, we contribute a benchmark called Identity Shades (IDS) database, which effectively quantifies the degree of the bias with respect to skin tone in existing face recogni…
Shenzhen Deepcam Information Technologies（深圳深瞳信息技术公司）；LinkSprite Technologies（联芯通科技公司）
We present the improved network architecture, data augmentation, and training strategies for the Webface track and Insightface/Glint360K track of the masked face recognition challenge of ICCV2021. One of the key goals is to have a balanced performance of masked and standard face recognition. In order to prevent the overfitting for the masked face recognition, we control the total number of masked faces by not more than 10\% of the total face recognition in the training dataset. We propose a few key changes to the face recognition network including a new stem unit, drop block, face detection an…
Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI)（韩国电子通信研究院）；Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国科学技术院）
For the past decades, face recognition (FR) has been actively studied in computer vision and pattern recognition society. Recently, due to the advances in deep learning, the FR technology shows high performance for most of the benchmark datasets. However, when the FR algorithm is applied to a real-world scenario, the performance has been known to be still unsatisfactory. This is mainly attributed to the mismatch between training and testing sets. Among such mismatches, face misalignment between training and testing faces is one of the factors that hinder successful FR. To address this limitati…
Multi-face alignment aims to identify geometry structures of multiple faces in an image, and its performance is essential for the many practical tasks, such as face recognition, face tracking, and face animation. In this work, we present a fast bottom-up multi-face alignment approach, which can simultaneously localize multi-person facial landmarks with high precision.In more detail, our bottom-up architecture maps the landmarks to the high-dimensional space with which landmarks of all faces are represented. By clustering the features belonging to the same face, our approach can align the multi…
Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Systems, USC（南加州大学机器人与智能系统研究所）；Information Sciences Institute, USC（南加州大学信息科学研究所）；The Open University of Israel（以色列开放大学）
We show how a simple convolutional neural network (CNN) can be trained to accurately and robustly regress 6 degrees of freedom (6DoF) 3D head pose, directly from image intensities. We further explain how this FacePoseNet (FPN) can be used to align faces in 2D and 3D as an alternative to explicit facial landmark detection for these tasks. We claim that in many cases the standard means of measuring landmark detector accuracy can be misleading when comparing different face alignments. Instead, we compare our FPN with existing methods by evaluating how they affect face recognition accuracy on the …
Sichuan University（四川大学）；Michigan State University（密歇根州立大学）
Face alignment and 3D face reconstruction are traditionally accomplished as separated tasks. By exploring the strong correlation between 2D landmarks and 3D shapes, in contrast, we propose a joint face alignment and 3D face reconstruction method to simultaneously solve these two problems for 2D face images of arbitrary poses and expressions. This method, based on a summation model of 3D faces and cascaded regression in 2D and 3D shape spaces, iteratively and alternately applies two cascaded regressors, one for updating 2D landmarks and the other for 3D shape. The 3D shape and the landmarks are…
South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；Shenzhen University（深圳大学）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）
Practical face recognition has been studied in the past decades, but still remains an open challenge. Current prevailing approaches have already achieved substantial breakthroughs in recognition accuracy. However, their performance usually drops dramatically if face samples are severely misaligned. To address this problem, we propose a highly efficient misalignment-robust locality-constrained representation (MRLR) algorithm for practical real-time face recognition. Specifically, the locality constraint that activates the most correlated atoms and suppresses the uncorrelated ones, is applied to…
The variation of pose, illumination and expression makes face recognition still a challenging problem. As a pre-processing in holistic approaches, faces are usually aligned by eyes. The proposed method tries to perform a pixel alignment rather than eye-alignment by mapping the geometry of faces to a reference face while keeping their own textures. The proposed geometry alignment not only creates a meaningful correspondence among every pixel of all faces, but also removes expression and pose variations effectively. The geometry alignment is performed pixel-wise, i.e., every pixel of the face is…
Sorbonne Université（索邦大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Institut des Systèmes Intelligents et de Robotique（智能系统与机器人研究所）；Datakalab
Face alignment consists in aligning a shape model on a face in an image. It is an active domain in computer vision as it is a preprocessing for applications like facial expression recognition, face recognition and tracking, face animation, etc. Current state-of-the-art methods already perform well on "easy" datasets, i.e. those that present moderate variations in head pose, expression, illumination or partial occlusions, but may not be robust to "in-the-wild" data. In this paper, we address this problem by using an ensemble of deep regressors instead of a single large regressor. Furthermore, i…
Plenty of effective methods have been proposed for face recognition during the past decade. Although these methods differ essentially in many aspects, a common practice of them is to specifically align the facial area based on the prior knowledge of human face structure before feature extraction. In most systems, the face alignment module is implemented independently. This has actually caused difficulties in the designing and training of end-to-end face recognition models. In this paper we study the possibility of alignment learning in end-to-end face recognition, in which neither prior knowle…
We reveal critical insights into problems of bias in state-of-the-art facial recognition (FR) systems using a novel Balanced Faces In the Wild (BFW) dataset: data balanced for gender and ethnic groups. We show variations in the optimal scoring threshold for face-pairs across different subgroups. Thus, the conventional approach of learning a global threshold for all pairs resulting in performance gaps among subgroups. By learning subgroup-specific thresholds, we not only mitigate problems in performance gaps but also show a notable boost in the overall performance. Furthermore, we do a human ev…
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）
Racial equality is an important theme of international human rights law, but it has been largely obscured when the overall face recognition accuracy is pursued blindly. More facts indicate racial bias indeed degrades the fairness of recognition system and the error rates on non-Caucasians are usually much higher than Caucasians. To encourage fairness, we introduce the idea of adaptive margin to learn balanced performance for different races based on large margin losses. A reinforcement learning based race balance network (RL-RBN) is proposed. We formulate the process of finding the optimal mar…
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；University of Twente（特文特大学）
Recently, it was shown that excellent results can be achieved in both face landmark localization and pose-invariant face recognition. These breakthroughs are attributed to the efforts of the community to manually annotate facial images in many different poses and to collect 3D faces data. In this paper, we propose a novel method for joint face landmark localization and frontal face reconstruction (pose correction) using a small set of frontal images only. By observing that the frontal facial image is the one with the minimum rank from all different poses we formulate an appropriate model which…
Facial landmark localisation in images captured in-the-wild is an important and challenging problem. The current state-of-the-art revolves around certain kinds of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) such as stacked U-Nets and Hourglass networks. In this work, we innovatively propose stacked dense U-Nets for this task. We design a novel scale aggregation network topology structure and a channel aggregation building block to improve the model's capacity without sacrificing the computational complexity and model size. With the assistance of deformable convolutions inside the stacked dense …
MIT（麻省理工学院）；McGovern Institute for Brain Research（麦戈文脑科学研究所）
The standard approach to unconstrained face recognition in natural photographs is via a detection, alignment, recognition pipeline. While that approach has achieved impressive results, there are several reasons to be dissatisfied with it, among them is its lack of biological plausibility. A recent theory of invariant recognition by feedforward hierarchical networks, like HMAX, other convolutional networks, or possibly the ventral stream, implies an alternative approach to unconstrained face recognition. This approach accomplishes detection and alignment implicitly by storing transformations of…
University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；University of Chicago（芝加哥大学）
Many existing works have made great strides towards reducing racial bias in face recognition. However, most of these methods attempt to rectify bias that manifests in models during training instead of directly addressing a major source of the bias, the dataset itself. Exceptions to this are BUPT-Balancedface/RFW and Fairface, but these works assume that primarily training on a single race or not racially balancing the dataset are inherently disadvantageous. We demonstrate that these assumptions are not necessarily valid. In our experiments, training on only African faces induced less bias than…
Northeastern University（东北大学）；University of Massachusetts Dartmouth（马萨诸塞大学达特茅斯分校）；Southeast University（东南大学）
There is an urgent need to apply face alignment in a memory-efficient and real-time manner due to the recent explosion of face recognition applications. However, impact factors such as large pose variation and computational inefficiency, still hinder its broad implementation. To this end, we propose a computationally efficient deep evolutionary model integrated with 3D Diffusion Heap Maps (DHM). First, we introduce a sparse 3D DHM to assist the initial modeling process under extreme pose conditions. Afterward, a simple and effective CNN feature is extracted and fed to Recurrent Neural Network …
Facial landmark localization plays an important role in face recognition and analysis applications. In this paper, we give a brief introduction to a coarse-to-fine pipeline with neural networks and sequential regression. First, a global convolutional network is applied to the holistic facial image to give an initial landmark prediction. A pyramid of multi-scale local image patches is then cropped to feed to a new network for each landmark to refine the prediction. As the refinement network outputs a more accurate position estimation than the input, such procedure could be repeated several time…
AIBEE（爱笔（北京）科技有限公司）；Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Mininglamp Technology（明略科技集团）
A standard pipeline of current face recognition frameworks consists of four individual steps: locating a face with a rough bounding box and several fiducial landmarks, aligning the face image using a pre-defined template, extracting representations and comparing. Among them, face detection, landmark detection and representation learning have long been studied and a lot of works have been proposed. As an essential step with a significant impact on recognition performance, the alignment step has attracted little attention. In this paper, we first explore and highlight the effects of different al…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；University of Macau（澳门大学）；University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
Developing a reliable and practical face recognition system is a long-standing goal in computer vision research. Existing literature suggests that pixel-wise face alignment is the key to achieve high-accuracy face recognition. By assuming a human face as piece-wise planar surfaces, where each surface corresponds to a facial part, we develop in this paper a Constrained Part-based Alignment (CPA) algorithm for face recognition across pose and/or expression. Our proposed algorithm is based on a trainable CPA model, which learns appearance evidence of individual parts and a tree-structured shape c…
University of Notre Dame（圣母大学）；Florida Institute of Technology（佛罗里达理工学院）
It is broadly accepted that there is a "gender gap" in face recognition accuracy, with females having higher false match and false non-match rates. However, relatively little is known about the cause(s) of this gender gap. Even the recent NIST report on demographic effects lists "analyze cause and effect" under "what we did not do". We first demonstrate that female and male hairstyles have important differences that impact face recognition accuracy. In particular, compared to females, male facial hair contributes to creating a greater average difference in appearance between different male fac…
NEC Biometrics Research Laboratories（NEC生物识别研究实验室）；NEC Corporation（NEC公司）
Face recognition for visible light (VIS) images achieve high accuracy thanks to the recent development of deep learning. However, heterogeneous face recognition (HFR), which is a face matching in different domains, is still a difficult task due to the domain discrepancy and lack of large HFR dataset. Several methods have attempted to reduce the domain discrepancy by means of fine-tuning, which causes significant degradation of the performance in the VIS domain because it loses the highly discriminative VIS representation. To overcome this problem, we propose joint feature distribution alignmen…
National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, CASIA（中国科学院自动化研究所模式识别国家重点实验室）；Center for Research on Intelligent Perception and Computing, CASIA（中国科学院自动化研究所智能感知与计算研究中心）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Noah’s Ark Lab of Huawei Technologies（华为技术有限公司诺亚方舟实验室）；Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, CAS（中国科学院脑科学与智能技术卓越创新中心）
Multi-view face synthesis from a single image is an ill-posed problem and often suffers from serious appearance distortion. Producing photo-realistic and identity preserving multi-view results is still a not well defined synthesis problem. This paper proposes Load Balanced Generative Adversarial Networks (LB-GAN) to precisely rotate the yaw angle of an input face image to any specified angle. LB-GAN decomposes the challenging synthesis problem into two well constrained subtasks that correspond to a face normalizer and a face editor respectively. The normalizer first frontalizes an input image,…
Recently, 3D face reconstruction and face alignment tasks are gradually combined into one task: 3D dense face alignment. Its goal is to reconstruct the 3D geometric structure of face with pose information. In this paper, we propose a graph convolution network to regress 3D face coordinates. Our method directly performs feature learning on the 3D face mesh, where the geometric structure and details are well preserved. Extensive experiments show that our approach gains superior performance over state-of-the-art methods on several challenging datasets.
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Cardiff University（卡迪夫大学）
In this paper, we present a deep learning based image feature extraction method designed specifically for face images. To train the feature extraction model, we construct a large scale photo-realistic face image dataset with ground-truth correspondence between multi-view face images, which are synthesized from real photographs via an inverse rendering procedure. The deep face feature (DFF) is trained using correspondence between face images rendered from different views. Using the trained DFF model, we can extract a feature vector for each pixel of a face image, which distinguishes different f…
In this paper, we propose Deep Alignment Network (DAN), a robust face alignment method based on a deep neural network architecture. DAN consists of multiple stages, where each stage improves the locations of the facial landmarks estimated by the previous stage. Our method uses entire face images at all stages, contrary to the recently proposed face alignment methods that rely on local patches. This is possible thanks to the use of landmark heatmaps which provide visual information about landmark locations estimated at the previous stages of the algorithm. The use of entire face images rather t…
Existing public face datasets are strongly biased toward Caucasian faces, and other races (e.g., Latino) are significantly underrepresented. This can lead to inconsistent model accuracy, limit the applicability of face analytic systems to non-White race groups, and adversely affect research findings based on such skewed data. To mitigate the race bias in these datasets, we construct a novel face image dataset, containing 108,501 images, with an emphasis of balanced race composition in the dataset. We define 7 race groups: White, Black, Indian, East Asian, Southeast Asian, Middle East, and Lati…
Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学）；Collaborative Innovation Center of Novel Software Technology and Industrialization（新型软件技术及产业化协同创新中心）
Over the last two decades, face alignment or localizing fiducial facial points has received increasing attention owing to its comprehensive applications in automatic face analysis. However, such a task has proven extremely challenging in unconstrained environments due to many confounding factors, such as pose, occlusions, expression and illumination. While numerous techniques have been developed to address these challenges, this problem is still far away from being solved. In this survey, we present an up-to-date critical review of the existing literatures on face alignment, focusing on those …
While Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have significantly boosted the performance of face related algorithms, maintaining accuracy and efficiency simultaneously in practical use remains challenging. The state-of-the-art methods employ deeper networks for better performance, which makes it less practical for mobile applications because of more parameters and higher computational complexity. Therefore, we propose an efficient multitask neural network, Alignment & Tracking & Pose Network (ATPN) for face alignment, face tracking and head pose estimation. Specifically, to achieve better perform…
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；Harvard University（哈佛大学）
In this paper we propose a supervised initialization scheme for cascaded face alignment based on explicit head pose estimation. We first investigate the failure cases of most state of the art face alignment approaches and observe that these failures often share one common global property, i.e. the head pose variation is usually large. Inspired by this, we propose a deep convolutional network model for reliable and accurate head pose estimation. Instead of using a mean face shape, or randomly selected shapes for cascaded face alignment initialisation, we propose two schemes for generating initi…
Jiangnan University（江南大学）；University of Surry（萨里大学）
3D face alignment of monocular images is a crucial process in the recognition of faces with disguise.3D face reconstruction facilitated by alignment can restore the face structure which is helpful in detcting disguise interference.This paper proposes a dual attention mechanism and an efficient end-to-end 3D face alignment framework.We build a stable network model through Depthwise Separable Convolution, Densely Connected Convolutional and Lightweight Channel Attention Mechanism. In order to enhance the ability of the network model to extract the spatial features of the face region, we adopt Sp…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Tianjin University（天津大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；East China Normal University（华东师范大学）
Facial action unit (AU) detection and face alignment are two highly correlated tasks since facial landmarks can provide precise AU locations to facilitate the extraction of meaningful local features for AU detection. Most existing AU detection works often treat face alignment as a preprocessing and handle the two tasks independently. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end deep learning framework for joint AU detection and face alignment, which has not been explored before. In particular, multi-scale shared features are learned firstly, and high-level features of face alignment are fed in…
Michigan State University（密歇根州立大学）；Monta Vista High School（蒙塔维斯塔高中）
Face alignment is a classic problem in the computer vision field. Previous works mostly focus on sparse alignment with a limited number of facial landmark points, i.e., facial landmark detection. In this paper, for the first time, we aim at providing a very dense 3D alignment for large-pose face images. To achieve this, we train a CNN to estimate the 3D face shape, which not only aligns limited facial landmarks but also fits face contours and SIFT feature points. Moreover, we also address the bottleneck of training CNN with multiple datasets, due to different landmark markups on different data…
Robust 3D Face Alignment with Multi-Path Neural Architecture Search
Institute of Deep Learning (IDL)（深度学习研究所（IDL））；Southeast University（东南大学）；Computer Vision Technology Institution（计算机视觉技术研究所）；Baidu（百度）；Baidu Research（百度研究院）
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Dataset bias is a well known problem in object recognition domain. This issue, nonetheless, is rarely explored in face alignment research. In this study, we show that dataset plays an integral part of face alignment performance. Specifically, owing to face alignment dataset bias, training on one database and testing on another or unseen domain would lead to poor performance. Creating an unbiased dataset through combining various existing databases, however, is non-trivial as one has to exhaustively re-label the landmarks for standardisation. In this work, we propose a simple and yet effective …
Three-dimensional face dense alignment and reconstruction in the wild is a challenging problem as partial facial information is commonly missing in occluded and large pose face images. Large head pose variations also increase the solution space and make the modeling more difficult. Our key idea is to model occlusion and pose to decompose this challenging task into several relatively more manageable subtasks. To this end, we propose an end-to-end framework, termed as Self-aligned Dual face Regression Network (SADRNet), which predicts a pose-dependent face, a pose-independent face. They are comb…
University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）
We present an algorithm for extracting key-point descriptors using deep convolutional neural networks (CNN). Unlike many existing deep CNNs, our model computes local features around a given point in an image. We also present a face alignment algorithm based on regression using these local descriptors. The proposed method called Local Deep Descriptor Regression (LDDR) is able to localize face landmarks of varying sizes, poses and occlusions with high accuracy. Deep Descriptors presented in this paper are able to uniquely and efficiently describe every pixel in the image and therefore can potent…
Face alignment aims to estimate the locations of a set of landmarks for a given image. This problem has received much attention as evidenced by the recent advancement in both the methodology and performance. However, most of the existing works neither explicitly handle face images with arbitrary poses, nor perform large-scale experiments on non-frontal and profile face images. In order to address these limitations, this paper proposes a novel face alignment algorithm that estimates both 2D and 3D landmarks and their 2D visibilities for a face image with an arbitrary pose. By integrating a 3D d…
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
The problem of face alignment has been intensively studied in the past years. A large number of novel methods have been proposed and reported very good performance on benchmark dataset such as 300W. However, the differences in the experimental setting and evaluation metric, missing details in the description of the methods make it hard to reproduce the results reported and evaluate the relative merits. For instance, most recent face alignment methods are built on top of face detection but from different face detectors. In this paper, we carry out a rigorous evaluation of these methods by makin…
Face Alignment is an active computer vision domain, that consists in localizing a number of facial landmarks that vary across datasets. State-of-the-art face alignment methods either consist in end-to-end regression, or in refining the shape in a cascaded manner, starting from an initial guess. In this paper, we introduce DeCaFA, an end-to-end deep convolutional cascade architecture for face alignment. DeCaFA uses fully-convolutional stages to keep full spatial resolution throughout the cascade. Between each cascade stage, DeCaFA uses multiple chained transfer layers with spatial softmax to pr…
University of Liverpool（利物浦大学）；Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院宁波材料技术与工程研究所）；China Science IntelliCloud Technology Co., Ltd.（中国科学智能云科技有限公司）；Remark AI UK Limited（Remark AI英国有限公司）
In this paper, we propose a novel multi-level aggregation network to regress the coordinates of the vertices of a 3D face from a single 2D image in an end-to-end manner. This is achieved by seamlessly combining standard convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with Graph Convolution Networks (GCNs). By iteratively and hierarchically fusing the features across different layers and stages of the CNNs and GCNs, our approach can provide a dense face alignment and 3D face reconstruction simultaneously for the benefit of direct feature learning of 3D face mesh. Experiments on several challenging dataset…
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Michigan State University（密歇根州立大学）
Face alignment, which fits a face model to an image and extracts the semantic meanings of facial pixels, has been an important topic in CV community. However, most algorithms are designed for faces in small to medium poses (below 45 degree), lacking the ability to align faces in large poses up to 90 degree. The challenges are three-fold: Firstly, the commonly used landmark-based face model assumes that all the landmarks are visible and is therefore not suitable for profile views. Secondly, the face appearance varies more dramatically across large poses, ranging from frontal view to profile vie…
Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL)（三菱电机研究实验室（MERL））；Intel Corporation（英特尔公司）
Face alignment, which is the task of finding the locations of a set of facial landmark points in an image of a face, is useful in widespread application areas. Face alignment is particularly challenging when there are large variations in pose (in-plane and out-of-plane rotations) and facial expression. To address this issue, we propose a cascade in which each stage consists of a mixture of regression experts. Each expert learns a customized regression model that is specialized to a different subset of the joint space of pose and expressions. The system is invariant to a predefined class of tra…
Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）
Face detection and alignment in unconstrained environment are challenging due to various poses, illuminations and occlusions. Recent studies show that deep learning approaches can achieve impressive performance on these two tasks. In this paper, we propose a deep cascaded multi-task framework which exploits the inherent correlation between them to boost up their performance. In particular, our framework adopts a cascaded structure with three stages of carefully designed deep convolutional networks that predict face and landmark location in a coarse-to-fine manner. In addition, in the learning …
Although deep neural networks have achieved reasonable accuracy in solving face alignment, it is still a challenging task, specifically when we deal with facial images, under occlusion, or extreme head poses. Heatmap-based Regression (HBR) and Coordinate-based Regression (CBR) are among the two mainly used methods for face alignment. CBR methods require less computer memory, though their performance is less than HBR methods. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Coordinate-based Regression (ACR) loss to improve the accuracy of CBR for face alignment. Inspired by the Active Shape Model (ASM), w…
In this paper, we present a deep regression approach for face alignment. The deep architecture consists of a global layer and multi-stage local layers. We apply the back-propagation algorithm with the dropout strategy to jointly optimize the regression parameters. We show that the resulting deep regressor gradually and evenly approaches the true facial landmarks stage by stage, avoiding the tendency to yield over-strong early stage regressors while over-weak later stage regressors. Experimental results show that our approach achieves the state-of-the-art
In this work we present a face alignment pipeline based on two novel methods: weighted splitting for K-cluster Regression Forests and 3D Affine Pose Regression for face shape initialization. Our face alignment method is based on the Local Binary Feature framework, where instead of standard regression forests and pixel difference features used in the original method, we use our K-cluster Regression Forests with Weighted Splitting (KRFWS) and Pyramid HOG features. We also use KRFWS to perform Affine Pose Regression (APR) and 3D-Affine Pose Regression (3D-APR), which intend to improve the face sh…
University of Notre Dame（圣母大学）；Facebook AI（脸书人工智能研究院）
We propose real-time, six degrees of freedom (6DoF), 3D face pose estimation without face detection or landmark localization. We observe that estimating the 6DoF rigid transformation of a face is a simpler problem than facial landmark detection, often used for 3D face alignment. In addition, 6DoF offers more information than face bounding box labels. We leverage these observations to make multiple contributions: (a) We describe an easily trained, efficient, Faster R-CNN--based model which regresses 6DoF pose for all faces in the photo, without preliminary face detection. (b) We explain how pos…
China University of Mining and Technology（中国矿业大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Tianjin University（天津大学）；Monash University（莫纳什大学）；East China Normal University（华东师范大学）
Facial action unit (AU) detection and face alignment are two highly correlated tasks, since facial landmarks can provide precise AU locations to facilitate the extraction of meaningful local features for AU detection. However, most existing AU detection works handle the two tasks independently by treating face alignment as a preprocessing, and often use landmarks to predefine a fixed region or attention for each AU. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end deep learning framework for joint AU detection and face alignment, which has not been explored before. In particular, multi-scale share…
