Dense Face Alignment
This addresses the need for more detailed face alignment in computer vision applications, though it is incremental by extending sparse to dense alignment.
The paper tackles the problem of dense 3D face alignment for large-pose images, achieving high-quality fitting and outperforming state-of-the-art facial landmark detection methods on challenging datasets with real-time performance.
Face alignment is a classic problem in the computer vision field. Previous works mostly focus on sparse alignment with a limited number of facial landmark points, i.e., facial landmark detection. In this paper, for the first time, we aim at providing a very dense 3D alignment for large-pose face images. To achieve this, we train a CNN to estimate the 3D face shape, which not only aligns limited facial landmarks but also fits face contours and SIFT feature points. Moreover, we also address the bottleneck of training CNN with multiple datasets, due to different landmark markups on different datasets, such as 5, 34, 68. Experimental results show our method not only provides high-quality, dense 3D face fitting but also outperforms the state-of-the-art facial landmark detection methods on the challenging datasets. Our model can run at real time during testing.