We propose a novel cascaded framework, namely deep deformation network (DDN), for localizing landmarks in non-rigid objects. The hallmarks of DDN are its incorporation of geometric constraints within a convolutional neural network (CNN) framework, ease and efficiency of training, as well as generality of application. A novel shape basis network (SBN) forms the first stage of the cascade, whereby landmarks are initialized by combining the benefits of CNN features and a learned shape basis to reduce the complexity of the highly nonlinear pose manifold. In the second stage, a point transformer network (PTN) estimates local deformation parameterized as thin-plate spline transformation for a finer refinement. Our framework does not incorporate either handcrafted features or part connectivity, which enables an end-to-end shape prediction pipeline during both training and testing. In contrast to prior cascaded networks for landmark localization that learn a mapping from feature space to landmark locations, we demonstrate that the regularization induced through geometric priors in the DDN makes it easier to train, yet produces superior results. The efficacy and generality of the architecture is demonstrated through state-of-the-art performances on several benchmarks for multiple tasks such as facial landmark localization, human body pose estimation and bird part localization.
 Human faces captured in real-world conditions present large variations in shape and occlusions due to differences in pose, expression, use of accessories such as sunglasses and hats and interactions with objects (e.g. food). Current face landmark estimation approaches struggle under such conditions since they fail to provide a principled way of handling outliers. We propose a novel method, called Robust Cascaded Pose Regression (RCPR) which reduces exposure to outliers by detecting occlusions explicitly and using robust shape-indexed features. We show that RCPR improves on previous landmark estimation methods on three popular face datasets (LFPW, LFW and HELEN). We further explore RCPR's performance by introducing a novel face dataset focused on occlusion, composed of 1,007 faces presenting a wide range of occlusion patterns. RCPR reduces failure cases by half on all four datasets, at the same time as it detects face occlusions with a 80 40 precision recall. We present a unified model for face detection, pose estimation, and landmark estimation in real-world, cluttered images. Our model is based on a mixtures of trees with a shared pool of parts; we model every facial landmark as a part and use global mixtures to capture topological changes due to viewpoint. We show that tree-structured models are surprisingly effective at capturing global elastic deformation, while being easy to optimize unlike dense graph structures. We present extensive results on standard face benchmarks, as well as a new “in the wild” annotated dataset, that suggests our system advances the state-of-the-art, sometimes considerably, for all three tasks. Though our model is modestly trained with hundreds of faces, it compares favorably to commercial systems trained with billions of examples (such as Google Picasa and face.com). This paper explores the localization of pre-defined semantic object parts, which is much more challenging than traditional object detection and very important for applications such as face recognition, HCI and fine-grained object recognition. To address this problem, we make two critical improvements over the widely used deformable part model (DPM). The first is that we use appearance based shape regression to globally estimate the anchor location of each part and then locally refine each part according to the estimated anchor location under the constraint of DPM. The DPM with shape regression (SR-DPM) is more flexible than the traditional DPM by relaxing the fixed anchor location of each part. It enjoys the efficient dynamic programming inference as traditional DPM and can be discriminatively trained via a coordinate descent procedure. The second is that we propose to stack multiple SR-DPMs, where each layer uses the output of previous SR-DPM as the input to progressively refine the result. It provides an analogy to deep neural network while benefiting from hand-crafted feature and model. The proposed methods are applied to human pose estimation, face alignment and general object part localization tasks and achieve state-of-the-art performance.