Real time 3D face alignment with Random Forests-based Active Appearance Models

Many desirable applications dealing with automatic face analysis rely on robust facial feature localization. While extensive research has been carried out on standard 2D imagery, recent technological advances made the acquisition of 3D data both accurate and affordable, opening new ways to more accurate and robust algorithms. We present a model-based approach to real time face alignment, fitting a 3D model to depth and intensity images of unseen expressive faces. We use random regression forests to drive the fitting in an Active Appearance Model framework. We thoroughly evaluated the proposed approach on publicly available datasets and show how adding the depth channel boosts the robustness and accuracy of the algorithm.