Stacked Dense U-Nets with Dual Transformers for Robust Face Alignment

Jia Guo; Jiankang Deng; Niannan Xue; Stefanos Zafeiriou

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arXiv · 1812.01936

Stacked Dense U-Nets with Dual Transformers for Robust Face Alignment

Jia Guo·Jiankang Deng·Niannan Xue·Stefanos Zafeiriou

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Abstract

Facial landmark localisation in images captured in-the-wild is an important and challenging problem. The current state-of-the-art revolves around certain kinds of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) such as stacked U-Nets and Hourglass networks. In this work, we innovatively propose stacked dense U-Nets for this task. We design a novel scale aggregation network topology structure and a channel aggregation building block to improve the model's capacity without sacrificing the computational complexity and model size. With the assistance of deformable convolutions inside the stacked dense U-Nets and coherent loss for outside data transformation, our model obtains the ability to be spatially invariant to arbitrary input face images. Extensive experiments on many in-the-wild datasets, validate the robustness of the proposed method under extreme poses, exaggerated expressions and heavy occlusions. Finally, we show that accurate 3D face alignment can assist pose-invariant face recognition where we achieve a new state-of-the-art accuracy on CFP-FP.

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BibTeX RIS

Jia Guo, Jiankang Deng, Niannan Xue, Stefanos Zafeiriou. 2018-12-05. Stacked Dense U-Nets with Dual Transformers for Robust Face Alignment. https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.01936

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