Facial landmark localization: Past, present and future

Face landmarking, defined as the detection and localization of certain keypoints points on the face, plays arguably the important role as an intermediary step for many subsequent face processing operations that ranges from biometric recognition to the understanding of mental states. Though its conceptual simplicity, the computer vision problem has proven extremely challenging due to multitude of compound factors such as pose, expression, occlusion and illumination. In this paper, we survey the recent advances of facial landmarks localization techniques and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the presented algorithms.