The Blessing and the Curse of the Noise behind Facial Landmark Annotations
This addresses a specific issue in computer vision for applications like facial recognition and expression analysis, but appears incremental as it builds on existing noise modeling approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of unstable facial landmark detection in videos caused by inconsistent annotation quality in public datasets, and demonstrates improvements in both accuracy and stability of detected facial landmarks.
The evolving algorithms for 2D facial landmark detection empower people to recognize faces, analyze facial expressions, etc. However, existing methods still encounter problems of unstable facial landmarks when applied to videos. Because previous research shows that the instability of facial landmarks is caused by the inconsistency of labeling quality among the public datasets, we want to have a better understanding of the influence of annotation noise in them. In this paper, we make the following contributions: 1) we propose two metrics that quantitatively measure the stability of detected facial landmarks, 2) we model the annotation noise in an existing public dataset, 3) we investigate the influence of different types of noise in training face alignment neural networks, and propose corresponding solutions. Our results demonstrate improvements in both accuracy and stability of detected facial landmarks.