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 IJB-A and IJB-B benchmarks: using the same recognition pipeline, but varying the face alignment method. Our results show that (a) better landmark detection accuracy measured on the 300W benchmark does not necessarily imply better face recognition accuracy. (b) Our FPN provides superior 2D and 3D face alignment on both benchmarks. Finally, (c), FPN aligns faces at a small fraction of the computational cost of comparably accurate landmark detectors. For many purposes, FPN is thus a far faster and far more accurate face alignment method than using facial landmark detectors.
Many computer vision problems (e.g., camera calibration, image alignment, structure from motion) are solved through a nonlinear optimization method. It is generally accepted that 2nd order descent methods are the most robust, fast and reliable approaches for nonlinear optimization of a general smooth function. However, in the context of computer vision, 2nd order descent methods have two main drawbacks: (1) The function might not be analytically differentiable and numerical approximations are impractical. (2) The Hessian might be large and not positive definite. To address these issues, this paper proposes a Supervised Descent Method (SDM) for minimizing a Non-linear Least Squares (NLS) function. During training, the SDM learns a sequence of descent directions that minimizes the mean of NLS functions sampled at different points. In testing, SDM minimizes the NLS objective using the learned descent directions without computing the Jacobian nor the Hessian. We illustrate the benefits of our approach in synthetic and real examples, and show how SDM achieves state-of-the-art performance in the problem of facial feature detection. The code is available at www.humansensing.cs. cmu.edu intraface. We present a data-driven method for estimating the 3D shapes of faces viewed in single, unconstrained photos (aka "in-the-wild"). Our method was designed with an emphasis on robustness and efficiency - with the explicit goal of deployment in real-world applications which reconstruct and display faces in 3D. Our key observation is that for many practical applications, warping the shape of a reference face to match the appearance of a query, is enough to produce realistic impressions of the query's 3D shape. Doing so, however, requires matching visual features between the (possibly very different) query and reference images, while ensuring that a plausible face shape is produced. To this end, we describe an optimization process which seeks to maximize the similarity of appearances and depths, jointly, to those of a reference model. We describe our system for monocular face shape reconstruction and present both qualitative and quantitative experiments, comparing our method against alternative systems, and demonstrating its capabilities. Finally, as a testament to its suitability for real-world applications, we offer an open, on-line implementation of our system, providing unique means of instant 3D viewing of faces appearing in web photos. 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).