Joint Multi-View Face Alignment in the Wild

The de facto algorithm for facial landmark estimation involves running a face detector with a subsequent deformable model fitting on the bounding box. This encompasses two basic problems: 1) the detection and deformable fitting steps are performed independently, while the detector might not provide the best-suited initialization for the fitting step, and 2) the face appearance varies hugely across different poses, which makes the deformable face fitting very challenging and thus distinct models have to be used (e.g., one for profile and one for frontal faces). In this paper, we propose the first, to the best of our knowledge, joint multi-view convolutional network to handle large pose variations across faces in-the-wild, and elegantly bridge face detection and facial landmark localization tasks. The existing joint face detection and landmark localization methods focus only on a very small set of landmarks. By contrast, our method can detect and align a large number of landmarks for semi-frontal (68 landmarks) and profile (39 landmarks) faces. We evaluate our model on a plethora of datasets including the standard static image datasets such as IBUG, 300W, COFW, and the latest Menpo Benchmark for both semi-frontal and profile faces. A significant improvement over the state-of-the-art methods on deformable face tracking is witnessed on the 300VW benchmark. We also demonstrate state-of-the-art results for face detection on FDDB and MALF datasets.