Simultaneous Facial Landmark Detection, Pose and Deformation Estimation under Facial Occlusion

Facial landmark detection, head pose estimation, and facial deformation analysis are typical facial behavior analysis tasks in computer vision. The existing methods usually perform each task independently and sequentially, ignoring their interactions. To tackle this problem, we propose a unified framework for simultaneous facial landmark detection, head pose estimation, and facial deformation analysis, and the proposed model is robust to facial occlusion. Following a cascade procedure augmented with model-based head pose estimation, we iteratively update the facial landmark locations, facial occlusion, head pose and facial de- formation until convergence. The experimental results on benchmark databases demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for simultaneous facial landmark detection, head pose and facial deformation estimation, even if the images are under facial occlusion.Comment: International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 201

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

MoFA: Model-based Deep Convolutional Face Autoencoder for Unsupervised Monocular Reconstruction

In this work we propose a novel model-based deep convolutional autoencoder that addresses the highly challenging problem of reconstructing a 3D human face from a single in-the-wild color image. To this end, we combine a convolutional encoder network with an expert-designed generative model that serves as decoder. The core innovation is our new differentiable parametric decoder that encapsulates image formation analytically based on a generative model. Our decoder takes as input a code vector with exactly defined semantic meaning that encodes detailed face pose, shape, expression, skin reflectance and scene illumination. Due to this new way of combining CNN-based with model-based face reconstruction, the CNN-based encoder learns to extract semantically meaningful parameters from a single monocular input image. For the first time, a CNN encoder and an expert-designed generative model can be trained end-to-end in an unsupervised manner, which renders training on very large (unlabeled) real world data feasible. The obtained reconstructions compare favorably to current state-of-the-art approaches in terms of quality and richness of representation.Comment: International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) 2017 (Oral), 13 page