Fully Automatic Expression-Invariant Face Correspondence

We consider the problem of computing accurate point-to-point correspondences among a set of human face scans with varying expressions. Our fully automatic approach does not require any manually placed markers on the scan. Instead, the approach learns the locations of a set of landmarks present in a database and uses this knowledge to automatically predict the locations of these landmarks on a newly available scan. The predicted landmarks are then used to compute point-to-point correspondences between a template model and the newly available scan. To accurately fit the expression of the template to the expression of the scan, we use as template a blendshape model. Our algorithm was tested on a database of human faces of different ethnic groups with strongly varying expressions. Experimental results show that the obtained point-to-point correspondence is both highly accurate and consistent for most of the tested 3D face models

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

Two-stage Convolutional Part Heatmap Regression for the 1st 3D Face Alignment in the Wild (3DFAW) Challenge

This paper describes our submission to the 1st 3D Face Alignment in the Wild (3DFAW) Challenge. Our method builds upon the idea of convolutional part heatmap regression [1], extending it for 3D face alignment. Our method decomposes the problem into two parts: (a) X,Y (2D) estimation and (b) Z (depth) estimation. At the first stage, our method estimates the X,Y coordinates of the facial landmarks by producing a set of 2D heatmaps, one for each landmark, using convolutional part heatmap regression. Then, these heatmaps, alongside the input RGB image, are used as input to a very deep subnetwork trained via residual learning for regressing the Z coordinate. Our method ranked 1st in the 3DFAW Challenge, surpassing the second best result by more than 22%.Comment: Winner of 3D Face Alignment in the Wild (3DFAW) Challenge, ECCV 201

GAGAN: Geometry-Aware Generative Adversarial Networks

Deep generative models learned through adversarial training have become increasingly popular for their ability to generate naturalistic image textures. However, aside from their texture, the visual appearance of objects is significantly influenced by their shape geometry; information which is not taken into account by existing generative models. This paper introduces the Geometry-Aware Generative Adversarial Networks (GAGAN) for incorporating geometric information into the image generation process. Specifically, in GAGAN the generator samples latent variables from the probability space of a statistical shape model. By mapping the output of the generator to a canonical coordinate frame through a differentiable geometric transformation, we enforce the geometry of the objects and add an implicit connection from the prior to the generated object. Experimental results on face generation indicate that the GAGAN can generate realistic images of faces with arbitrary facial attributes such as facial expression, pose, and morphology, that are of better quality than current GAN-based methods. Our method can be used to augment any existing GAN architecture and improve the quality of the images generated

How far are we from solving the 2D & 3D face alignment problem? (and a dataset of 230,000 3D facial landmarks)

This paper investigates how far a very deep neural network is from attaining close to saturating performance on existing 2D and 3D face alignment datasets. To this end, we make the following 5 contributions: (a) we construct, for the first time, a very strong baseline by combining a state-of-the-art architecture for landmark localization with a state-of-the-art residual block, train it on a very large yet synthetically expanded 2D facial landmark dataset and finally evaluate it on all other 2D facial landmark datasets. (b)We create a guided by 2D landmarks network which converts 2D landmark annotations to 3D and unifies all existing datasets, leading to the creation of LS3D-W, the largest and most challenging 3D facial landmark dataset to date (~230,000 images). (c) Following that, we train a neural network for 3D face alignment and evaluate it on the newly introduced LS3D-W. (d) We further look into the effect of all “traditional” factors affecting face alignment performance like large pose, initialization and resolution, and introduce a “new” one, namely the size of the network. (e) We show that both 2D and 3D face alignment networks achieve performance of remarkable accuracy which is probably close to saturating the datasets used. Training and testing code as well as the dataset can be downloaded from https: //www.adrianbulat.com/face-alignment

Occlusion Coherence: Detecting and Localizing Occluded Faces

The presence of occluders significantly impacts object recognition accuracy. However, occlusion is typically treated as an unstructured source of noise and explicit models for occluders have lagged behind those for object appearance and shape. In this paper we describe a hierarchical deformable part model for face detection and landmark localization that explicitly models part occlusion. The proposed model structure makes it possible to augment positive training data with large numbers of synthetically occluded instances. This allows us to easily incorporate the statistics of occlusion patterns in a discriminatively trained model. We test the model on several benchmarks for landmark localization and detection including challenging new data sets featuring significant occlusion. We find that the addition of an explicit occlusion model yields a detection system that outperforms existing approaches for occluded instances while maintaining competitive accuracy in detection and landmark localization for unoccluded instances