Towards Highly Accurate and Stable Face Alignment for High-Resolution Videos

In recent years, heatmap regression based models have shown their effectiveness in face alignment and pose estimation. However, Conventional Heatmap Regression (CHR) is not accurate nor stable when dealing with high-resolution facial videos, since it finds the maximum activated location in heatmaps which are generated from rounding coordinates, and thus leads to quantization errors when scaling back to the original high-resolution space. In this paper, we propose a Fractional Heatmap Regression (FHR) for high-resolution video-based face alignment. The proposed FHR can accurately estimate the fractional part according to the 2D Gaussian function by sampling three points in heatmaps. To further stabilize the landmarks among continuous video frames while maintaining the precise at the same time, we propose a novel stabilization loss that contains two terms to address time delay and non-smooth issues, respectively. Experiments on 300W, 300-VW and Talking Face datasets clearly demonstrate that the proposed method is more accurate and stable than the state-of-the-art models.Comment: Accepted to AAAI 2019. 8 pages, 7 figure

Learning to Find Eye Region Landmarks for Remote Gaze Estimation in Unconstrained Settings

Conventional feature-based and model-based gaze estimation methods have proven to perform well in settings with controlled illumination and specialized cameras. In unconstrained real-world settings, however, such methods are surpassed by recent appearance-based methods due to difficulties in modeling factors such as illumination changes and other visual artifacts. We present a novel learning-based method for eye region landmark localization that enables conventional methods to be competitive to latest appearance-based methods. Despite having been trained exclusively on synthetic data, our method exceeds the state of the art for iris localization and eye shape registration on real-world imagery. We then use the detected landmarks as input to iterative model-fitting and lightweight learning-based gaze estimation methods. Our approach outperforms existing model-fitting and appearance-based methods in the context of person-independent and personalized gaze estimation

Robust Head-Pose Estimation Based on Partially-Latent Mixture of Linear Regressions

Head-pose estimation has many applications, such as social event analysis, human-robot and human-computer interaction, driving assistance, and so forth. Head-pose estimation is challenging because it must cope with changing illumination conditions, variabilities in face orientation and in appearance, partial occlusions of facial landmarks, as well as bounding-box-to-face alignment errors. We propose tu use a mixture of linear regressions with partially-latent output. This regression method learns to map high-dimensional feature vectors (extracted from bounding boxes of faces) onto the joint space of head-pose angles and bounding-box shifts, such that they are robustly predicted in the presence of unobservable phenomena. We describe in detail the mapping method that combines the merits of unsupervised manifold learning techniques and of mixtures of regressions. We validate our method with three publicly available datasets and we thoroughly benchmark four variants of the proposed algorithm with several state-of-the-art head-pose estimation methods.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, 3 table