A Comparative Study of Facial Landmark Localization Methods for Face Recognition Using HOG descriptors

This paper compares several approaches to extract facial landmarks and studies their influence on face recognition problems. In order to obtain fair comparisons, we use the same number of facial landmarks and the same type of descriptors (HOG descriptors) for each approach. The comparative results are obtained using FERET and FRGC datasets and show that better recognition rates are obtained when landmarks are located at real facial fiducial points. However, if the automatic detection of these is compromised by the difficulty of the images, better results are obtained using fixed landmarks grids.