In this paper we propose a supervised initialization scheme for cascaded face alignment based on explicit head pose estimation. We first investigate the failure cases of most state of the art face alignment approaches and observe that these failures often share one common global property, i.e. the head pose variation is usually large. Inspired by this, we propose a deep convolutional network model for reliable and accurate head pose estimation. Instead of using a mean face shape, or randomly selected shapes for cascaded face alignment initialisation, we propose two schemes for generating initialisation: the first one relies on projecting a mean 3D face shape (represented by 3D facial landmarks) onto 2D image under the estimated head pose; the second one searches nearest neighbour shapes from the training set according to head pose distance. By doing so, the initialisation gets closer to the actual shape, which enhances the possibility of convergence and in turn improves the face alignment performance. We demonstrate the proposed method on the benchmark 300W dataset and show very competitive performance in both head pose estimation and face alignment.
@cite_30: Although facial feature detection from 2D images is a well-studied field, there is a lack of real-time methods that estimate feature points even on low quality images. Here we propose conditional regression forest for this task. While regression forest learn the relations between facial image patches and the location of feature points from the entire set of faces, conditional regression forest learn the relations conditional to global face properties. In our experiments, we use the head pose as a global property and demonstrate that conditional regression forests outperform regression forests for facial feature detection. We have evaluated the method on the challenging Labeled Faces in the Wild [20] database where close-to-human accuracy is achieved while processing images in real-time.
@cite_35: 
@cite_37: We present a novel approach to localizing parts in images of human faces. The approach combines the output of local detectors with a non-parametric set of global models for the part locations based on over one thousand hand-labeled exemplar images. By assuming that the global models generate the part locations as hidden variables, we derive a Bayesian objective function. This function is optimized using a consensus of models for these hidden variables. The resulting localizer handles a much wider range of expression, pose, lighting and occlusion than prior ones. We show excellent performance on a new dataset gathered from the internet and show that our localizer achieves state-of-the-art performance on the less challenging BioID dataset.
@cite_22: In this paper, we present the details of our method in attending the 300 Faces in-the-wild (300W) challenge. We build our method on cascade regression framework, where a series of regressors are utilized to progressively refine the shape initialized by face detector. In cascade regression, we use the HOG feature in a multi-scale manner, where the large pose validation is handled in early stages by HOG feature at large scale, and then shape is refined at later stages with HOG feature at small scale. We observe that the performance of the cascade regression method decreases when the initialization provided by face detector is not accurate enough (for faces with large appearance variations, face detection is still a challenging problem). To handle the problem, we propose to generate multiple hypotheses, and then learn to rank or combine these hypotheses to get the final result. The parameters in both learn to rank and learn to combine can be learned in a structural SVM framework. Despite the simplicity of our method, it achieves state-of-the-art performance on LFPW, and dramatically outperforms the baseline AAM on the 300-W challenge.
@cite_21: We propose a data-driven approach to facial landmark localization that models the correlations between each landmark and its surrounding appearance features. At runtime, each feature casts a weighted vote to predict landmark locations, where the weight is precomputed to take into account the feature's discriminative power. The feature votingbased landmark detection is more robust than previous local appearance-based detectors, we combine it with nonparametric shape regularization to build a novel facial landmark localization pipeline that is robust to scale, in-plane rotation, occlusion, expression, and most importantly, extreme head pose. We achieve state-of-the-art performance on two especially challenging in-the-wild datasets populated by faces with extreme head pose and expression.
@cite_1: Detecting faces in uncontrolled environments continues to be a challenge to traditional face detection methods due to the large variation in facial appearances, as well as occlusion and clutter. In order to overcome these challenges, we present a novel and robust exemplar-based face detector that integrates image retrieval and discriminative learning. A large database of faces with bounding rectangles and facial landmark locations is collected, and simple discriminative classifiers are learned from each of them. A voting-based method is then proposed to let these classifiers cast votes on the test image through an efficient image retrieval technique. As a result, faces can be very efficiently detected by selecting the modes from the voting maps, without resorting to exhaustive sliding window-style scanning. Moreover, due to the exemplar-based framework, our approach can detect faces under challenging conditions without explicitly modeling their variations. Evaluation on two public benchmark datasets shows that our new face detection approach is accurate and efficient, and achieves the state-of-the-art performance. We further propose to use image retrieval for face validation (in order to remove false positives) and for face alignment landmark localization. The same methodology can also be easily generalized to other face-related tasks, such as attribute recognition, as well as general object detection.
@cite_32: A widely used approach for locating points on deformable objects in images is to generate feature response images for each point, and then to fit a shape model to these response images. We demonstrate that Random Forest regression-voting can be used to generate high quality response images quickly. Rather than using a generative or a discriminative model to evaluate each pixel, a regressor is used to cast votes for the optimal position of each point. We show that this leads to fast and accurate shape model matching when applied in the Constrained Local Model framework. We evaluate the technique in detail, and compare it with a range of commonly used alternatives across application areas: the annotation of the joints of the hands in radiographs and the detection of feature points in facial images. We show that our approach outperforms alternative techniques, achieving what we believe to be the most accurate results yet published for hand joint annotation and state-of-the-art performance for facial feature point detection.
@cite_6: Locating facial feature points in images of faces is an important stage for numerous facial image interpretation tasks. In this paper we present a method for fully automatic detection of 20 facial feature points in images of expressionless faces using Gabor feature based boosted classifiers. The method adopts fast and robust face detection algorithm, which represents an adapted version of the original Viola-Jones face detector. The detected face region is then divided into 20 relevant regions of interest, each of which is examined further to predict the location of the facial feature points. The proposed facial feature point detection method uses individual feature patch templates to detect points in the relevant region of interest. These feature models are GentleBoost templates built from both gray level intensities and Gabor wavelet features. When tested on the Cohn-Kanade database, the method has achieved average recognition rates of 93 .
@cite_0: In this paper we present a robust and accurate method to detect 17 facial landmarks in expressive face images. We introduce a new multi-resolution framework based on the recent multiple kernel algorithm. Low resolution patches carry the global information of the face and give a coarse but robust detection of the desired landmark. High resolution patches, using local details, refine this location. This process is combined with a bootstrap process and a statistical validation, both improving the system robustness. Combining independent point detection and prior knowledge on the point distribution, the proposed detector is robust to variable lighting conditions and facial expressions. This detector is tested on several databases and the results reported can be compared favorably with the current state of the art point detectors.
@cite_24: 
@cite_27: 
@cite_19: In this paper we propose a method for the localization of multiple facial features on challenging face images. In the regression forests (RF) framework, observations (patches) that are extracted at several image locations cast votes for the localization of several facial features. In order to filter out votes that are not relevant, we pass them through two types of sieves, that are organised in a cascade, and which enforce geometric constraints. The first sieve filters out votes that are not consistent with a hypothesis for the location of the face center. Several sieves of the second type, one associated with each individual facial point, filter out distant votes. We propose a method that adjusts on-the-fly the proximity threshold of each second type sieve by applying a classifier which, based on middle-level features extracted from voting maps for the facial feature in question, makes a sequence of decisions on whether the threshold should be reduced or not. We validate our proposed method on two challenging datasets with images collected from the Internet in which we obtain state of the art results without resorting to explicit facial shape models. We also show the benefits of our method for proximity threshold adjustment especially on 'difficult' face images.
@cite_31: We propose a new algorithm to detect facial points in frontal and near-frontal face images. It combines a regression-based approach with a probabilistic graphical model-based face shape model that restricts the search to anthropomorphically consistent regions. While most regression-based approaches perform a sequential approximation of the target location, our algorithm detects the target location by aggregating the estimates obtained from stochastically selected local appearance information into a single robust prediction. The underlying assumption is that by aggregating the different estimates, their errors will cancel out as long as the regressor inputs are uncorrelated. Once this new perspective is adopted, the problem is reformulated as how to optimally select the test locations over which the regressors are evaluated. We propose to extend the regression-based model to provide a quality measure of each prediction, and use the shape model to restrict and correct the sampling region. Our approach combines the low computational cost typical of regression-based approaches with the robustness of exhaustive-search approaches. The proposed algorithm was tested on over 7,500 images from five databases. Results showed significant improvement over the current state of the art.
@cite_11: This paper presents a method for extracting distinctive invariant features from images that can be used to perform reliable matching between different views of an object or scene. The features are invariant to image scale and rotation, and are shown to provide robust matching across a substantial range of affine distortion, change in 3D viewpoint, addition of noise, and change in illumination. The features are highly distinctive, in the sense that a single feature can be correctly matched with high probability against a large database of features from many images. This paper also describes an approach to using these features for object recognition. The recognition proceeds by matching individual features to a database of features from known objects using a fast nearest-neighbor algorithm, followed by a Hough transform to identify clusters belonging to a single object, and finally performing verification through least-squares solution for consistent pose parameters. This approach to recognition can robustly identify objects among clutter and occlusion while achieving near real-time performance.
There are three types of local feature detection. (1) Classification methods include Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier @cite_0 @cite_37 based on various image features such as Gabor @cite_6 , SIFT @cite_11 @cite_35 , HOG @cite_22 and multichannel correlation filter responses @cite_27 . (2) Regression-based approaches are also widely used. For instance, Support Vector Regressors (SVRs) are used in @cite_31 with a probabilistic MRF-based shape model and Continuous Conditional Neural Fields (CCNF) are used in @cite_24 . (3) Voting-based approaches are also introduced in recent years, including regression forests based voting methods @cite_32 @cite_30 @cite_19 and exemplar based voting methods @cite_21 @cite_1 .