Face Alignment Across Large Poses: A 3D Solution

Face alignment, which fits a face model to an image and extracts the semantic meanings of facial pixels, has been an important topic in CV community. However, most algorithms are designed for faces in small to medium poses (below 45 degree), lacking the ability to align faces in large poses up to 90 degree. The challenges are three-fold: Firstly, the commonly used landmark-based face model assumes that all the landmarks are visible and is therefore not suitable for profile views. Secondly, the face appearance varies more dramatically across large poses, ranging from frontal view to profile view. Thirdly, labelling landmarks in large poses is extremely challenging since the invisible landmarks have to be guessed. In this paper, we propose a solution to the three problems in an new alignment framework, called 3D Dense Face Alignment (3DDFA), in which a dense 3D face model is fitted to the image via convolutional neutral network (CNN). We also propose a method to synthesize large-scale training samples in profile views to solve the third problem of data labelling. Experiments on the challenging AFLW database show that our approach achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods.

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Datasets


Introduced in the Paper:

AFLW2000-3D

Used in the Paper:

300W Helen AFW LFPW BIWI Florence

Results from the Paper


Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Result Benchmark
Facial Landmark Detection 300W 3DDFA NME 7.01 # 13
Facial Landmark Detection 300W CFSS NME 5.76 # 11
Face Alignment AFLW2000 3DDFA Error rate 5.42 # 4
Face Alignment AFLW2000-3D 3DDFA + SDM Mean NME 4.94% # 12
3D Face Reconstruction AFLW2000-3D 3DDFA Mean NME 5.3695% # 6
Head Pose Estimation BIWI 3DDFA MAE (trained with other data) 19.068 # 17
3D Face Reconstruction Florence 3DDFA Mean NME 6.3833% # 3

Results from Other Papers


Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Rank Source Paper Compare
Head Pose Estimation AFLW2000 3DDFA MAE 7.393 # 22

Methods


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