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 than patches allows DAN to handle face images with large variation in head pose and difficult initializations. An extensive evaluation on two publicly available datasets shows that DAN reduces the state-of-the-art failure rate by up to 70 . Our method has also been submitted for evaluation as part of the Menpo challenge.
The use of heatmaps for face alignment related tasks precedes the proposed method. One method that uses heatmaps is @cite_42 , where a neural network outputs predictions in the form of a heatmap. In contrast, the proposed method uses heatmaps solely as a means for transferring information between stages.
@cite_42
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This paper describes our submission to the 1st 3D Face Alignment in the Wild (3DFAW) Challenge. Our method builds upon the idea of convolutional part heatmap regression (Bulat and Tzimiropoulos, 2016), extending it for 3D face alignment. Our method decomposes the problem into two parts: (a) X,Y (2D) estimation and (b) Z (depth) estimation. At the first stage, our method estimates the X,Y coordinates of the facial landmarks by producing a set of 2D heatmaps, one for each landmark, using convolutional part heatmap regression. Then, these heatmaps, alongside the input RGB image, are used as input to a very deep subnetwork trained via residual learning for regressing the Z coordinate. Our method ranked 1st in the 3DFAW Challenge, surpassing the second best result by more than 22 . Code can be found at http: www.cs.nott.ac.uk psxab5 .