Pose-Invariant 3D Face Alignment

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 deformable model, a cascaded coupled-regressor approach is designed to estimate both the camera projection matrix and the 3D landmarks. Furthermore, the 3D model also allows us to automatically estimate the 2D landmark visibilities via surface normals. We gather a substantially larger collection of all-pose face images to evaluate our algorithm and demonstrate superior performances than the state-of-the-art methods

A Comprehensive Performance Evaluation of Deformable Face Tracking "In-the-Wild"

Recently, technologies such as face detection, facial landmark localisation and face recognition and verification have matured enough to provide effective and efficient solutions for imagery captured under arbitrary conditions (referred to as "in-the-wild"). This is partially attributed to the fact that comprehensive "in-the-wild" benchmarks have been developed for face detection, landmark localisation and recognition/verification. A very important technology that has not been thoroughly evaluated yet is deformable face tracking "in-the-wild". Until now, the performance has mainly been assessed qualitatively by visually assessing the result of a deformable face tracking technology on short videos. In this paper, we perform the first, to the best of our knowledge, thorough evaluation of state-of-the-art deformable face tracking pipelines using the recently introduced 300VW benchmark. We evaluate many different architectures focusing mainly on the task of on-line deformable face tracking. In particular, we compare the following general strategies: (a) generic face detection plus generic facial landmark localisation, (b) generic model free tracking plus generic facial landmark localisation, as well as (c) hybrid approaches using state-of-the-art face detection, model free tracking and facial landmark localisation technologies. Our evaluation reveals future avenues for further research on the topic.Comment: E. Antonakos and P. Snape contributed equally and have joint second authorshi

300 faces in-the-wild challenge: database and results

Computer Vision has recently witnessed great research advance towards automatic facial points detection. Numerous methodologies have been proposed during the last few years that achieve accurate and efficient performance. However, fair comparison between these methodologies is infeasible mainly due to two issues. (a) Most existing databases, captured under both constrained and unconstrained (in-the-wild) conditions have been annotated using different mark-ups and, in most cases, the accuracy of the annotations is low. (b) Most published works report experimental results using different training/testing sets, different error metrics and, of course, landmark points with semantically different locations. In this paper, we aim to overcome the aforementioned problems by (a) proposing a semi-automatic annotation technique that was employed to re-annotate most existing facial databases under a unified protocol, and (b) presenting the 300 Faces In-The-Wild Challenge (300-W), the first facial landmark localization challenge that was organized twice, in 2013 and 2015. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effort towards a unified annotation scheme of massive databases and a fair experimental comparison of existing facial landmark localization systems. The images and annotations of the new testing database that was used in the 300-W challenge are available from http://ibug.doc.ic.ac.uk/resources/facial-point-annotations