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 method to bridge the disparate annotation spaces between databases, making datasets fusion possible. We show extensive results on combining various popular databases (LFW, AFLW, LFPW, HELEN) for improved cross-dataset and unseen data alignment.
Detection based approaches detects object parts independently and then estimates pose and or shape directly from the detections @cite_11 @cite_10 or through flexible part models @cite_28 @cite_16 @cite_20 . These methods are effective at detecting and localising articulated objects from multiple views in challenging scenarios. Sun al @cite_5 propose a cascaded deep convolutional network for five-points face alignment. The network detects approximate locations of the landmarks in the lower cascade and refine the estimations in higher cascade. State-of-the-art result is recently achieved by Zhang al @cite_23 @cite_14 using a deep convolutional network trained for facial landmark detection together with heterogeneous but subtly correlated tasks, like head pose estimation and facial attribute inference. The model achieves the state-of-the-art result on the 300-W benchmark dataset (mean error of 9.15
@cite_14 @cite_28 @cite_23 @cite_5 @cite_16 @cite_10 @cite_20 @cite_11
2495387757 169095154 2606181163 1896424170
Large pose variations remain to be a challenge that confronts real-word face detection. We propose a new cascaded Convolutional Neural Network, dubbed the name Supervised Transformer Network, to address this challenge. The first stage is a multi-task Region Proposal Network (RPN), which simultaneously predicts candidate face regions along with associated facial landmarks. The candidate regions are then warped by mapping the detected facial landmarks to their canonical positions to better normalize the face patterns. The second stage, which is a RCNN, then verifies if the warped candidate regions are valid faces or not. We conduct end-to-end learning of the cascaded network, including optimizing the canonical positions of the facial landmarks. This supervised learning of the transformations automatically selects the best scale to differentiate face non-face patterns. By combining feature maps from both stages of the network, we achieve state-of-the-art detection accuracies on several public benchmarks. For real-time performance, we run the cascaded network only on regions of interests produced from a boosting cascade face detector. Our detector runs at 30 FPS on a single CPU core for a VGA-resolution image. Facial landmark detection of face alignment has long been impeded by the problems of occlusion and pose variation. Instead of treating the detection task as a single and independent problem, we investigate the possibility of improving detection robustness through multitask learning. Specifically, we wish to optimize facial landmark detection together with heterogeneous but subtly correlated tasks, e.g. head pose estimation and facial attribute inference. This is non-trivial since different tasks have different learning difficulties and convergence rates. To address this problem, we formulate a novel tasks-constrained deep model, with task-wise early stopping to facilitate learning convergence. Extensive evaluations show that the proposed task-constrained learning (i) outperforms existing methods, especially in dealing with faces with severe occlusion and pose variation, and (ii) reduces model complexity drastically compared to the state-of-the-art method based on cascaded deep model [29]. In this technical report, we extend the method presented in our ECCV 2014 [39] paper to handle more landmark points (68 points instead of 5 major facial points) without either redesigning the deep model or involving significant increase in run time cost. This is made possible by transferring the learned 5-point model to the desired facial landmark configuration, through model fine-tuning with dense landmark annotations. Our new model achieves the state-of-the-art result on the 300-W benchmark dataset (mean error of 9.15 on the challenging IBUG subset). Abstract Facial landmark localization is a fundamental module for pose-invariant face recognition. The most common approach for facial landmark detection is cascaded regression, which is composed of two steps: feature extraction and facial shape regression. Recent methods employ deep convolutional networks to extract robust features for each step, while the whole system could be regarded as a deep cascaded regression architecture. In this work, instead of employing a deep regression network, a Globally Optimized Dual-Pathway (GoDP) deep architecture is proposed to identify the target pixels through solving a cascaded pixel labeling problem without resorting to high-level inference models or complex stacked architecture. The proposed end-to-end system relies on distance-aware soft-max functions and dual-pathway proposal-refinement architecture. Results show that it outperforms the state-of-the-art cascaded regression-based methods on multiple in-the-wild face alignment databases. The model achieves 1.84 normalized mean error (NME) on the AFLW database [1], which outperforms 3DDFA [2] by 61.8 . Experiments on face identification demonstrate that GoDP, coupled with DPM-headhunter [3], is able to improve rank-1 identification rate by 44.2 compare to Dlib [4] toolbox on a challenging database. Facial landmark detection has long been impeded by the problems of occlusion and pose variation. Instead of treating the detection task as a single and independent problem, we investigate the possibility of improving detection robustness through multi-task learning. Specifically, we wish to optimize facial landmark detection together with heterogeneous but subtly correlated tasks, e.g. head pose estimation and facial attribute inference. This is non-trivial since different tasks have different learning difficulties and convergence rates. To address this problem, we formulate a novel tasks-constrained deep model, with task-wise early stopping to facilitate learning convergence. Extensive evaluations show that the proposed task-constrained learning (i) outperforms existing methods, especially in dealing with faces with severe occlusion and pose variation, and (ii) reduces model complexity drastically compared to the state-of-the-art method based on cascaded deep model [21].