Deep Alignment Network: A Convolutional Neural Network for Robust Face Alignment
01 Jul 2017-pp 2034-2043
TL;DR: The use of entire face images rather than patches allows DAN to handle face images with large variation in head pose and difficult initializations, and reduces the state-of-the-art failure rate by up to 70%.
Abstract: In this paper, we propose Deep Alignment Network (DAN), a robust face alignment method based on a deep neural network architecture. DAN consists of multiple stages, where each stage improves the locations of the facial landmarks estimated by the previous stage. Our method uses entire face images at all stages, contrary to the recently proposed face alignment methods that rely on local patches. This is possible thanks to the use of landmark heatmaps which provide visual information about landmark locations estimated at the previous stages of the algorithm. The use of entire face images rather than patches allows DAN to handle face images with large variation in head pose and difficult initializations. An extensive evaluation on two publicly available datasets shows that DAN reduces the state-of-the-art failure rate by up to 70%. Our method has also been submitted for evaluation as part of the Menpo challenge.
Citations
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TL;DR: The High-Resolution Network (HRNet) as mentioned in this paper maintains high-resolution representations through the whole process by connecting the high-to-low resolution convolution streams in parallel and repeatedly exchanging the information across resolutions.
Abstract: High-resolution representations are essential for position-sensitive vision problems, such as human pose estimation, semantic segmentation, and object detection. Existing state-of-the-art frameworks first encode the input image as a low-resolution representation through a subnetwork that is formed by connecting high-to-low resolution convolutions in series (e.g., ResNet, VGGNet), and then recover the high-resolution representation from the encoded low-resolution representation. Instead, our proposed network, named as High-Resolution Network (HRNet), maintains high-resolution representations through the whole process. There are two key characteristics: (i) Connect the high-to-low resolution convolution streams in parallel and (ii) repeatedly exchange the information across resolutions. The benefit is that the resulting representation is semantically richer and spatially more precise. We show the superiority of the proposed HRNet in a wide range of applications, including human pose estimation, semantic segmentation, and object detection, suggesting that the HRNet is a stronger backbone for computer vision problems. All the codes are available at https://github.com/HRNet .
1,162 citations
18 Jun 2018
TL;DR: Zhang et al. as discussed by the authors proposed a deep end-to-end trainable face super-resolution network (FSRNet), which makes use of the geometry prior, i.e., facial landmark heatmaps and parsing maps, to super-resolve very low-resolution (LR) face images without well-aligned requirement.
Abstract: Face Super-Resolution (SR) is a domain-specific superresolution problem. The facial prior knowledge can be leveraged to better super-resolve face images. We present a novel deep end-to-end trainable Face Super-Resolution Network (FSRNet), which makes use of the geometry prior, i.e., facial landmark heatmaps and parsing maps, to super-resolve very low-resolution (LR) face images without well-aligned requirement. Specifically, we first construct a coarse SR network to recover a coarse high-resolution (HR) image. Then, the coarse HR image is sent to two branches: a fine SR encoder and a prior information estimation network, which extracts the image features, and estimates landmark heatmaps/parsing maps respectively. Both image features and prior information are sent to a fine SR decoder to recover the HR image. To generate realistic faces, we also propose the Face Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Network (FSRGAN) to incorporate the adversarial loss into FSRNet. Further, we introduce two related tasks, face alignment and parsing, as the new evaluation metrics for face SR, which address the inconsistency of classic metrics w.r.t. visual perception. Extensive experiments show that FSRNet and FSRGAN significantly outperforms state of the arts for very LR face SR, both quantitatively and qualitatively.
415 citations
01 Oct 2019
TL;DR: A novel loss function is proposed, named Adaptive Wing loss, that is able to adapt its shape to different types of ground truth heatmap pixels, that penalizes loss more on foreground pixels while less on background pixels.
Abstract: Heatmap regression with a deep network has become one of the mainstream approaches to localize facial landmarks. However, the loss function for heatmap regression is rarely studied. In this paper, we analyze the ideal loss function properties for heatmap regression in face alignment problems. Then we propose a novel loss function, named Adaptive Wing loss, that is able to adapt its shape to different types of ground truth heatmap pixels. This adaptability penalizes loss more on foreground pixels while less on background pixels. To address the imbalance between foreground and background pixels, we also propose Weighted Loss Map, which assigns high weights on foreground and difficult background pixels to help training process focus more on pixels that are crucial to landmark localization. To further improve face alignment accuracy, we introduce boundary prediction and CoordConv with boundary coordinates. Extensive experiments on different benchmarks, including COFW, 300W and WFLW, show our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art by a significant margin on various evaluation metrics. Besides, the Adaptive Wing loss also helps other heatmap regression tasks.
183 citations
Cites background from "Deep Alignment Network: A Convoluti..."
...erated from landmark coordinates, is widely used for face alignment [5, 29, 64, 50]....
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01 Jul 2017
TL;DR: A new benchmark for facial landmark localisation, contrary to the previous benchmarks, contains facial images both in (nearly) frontal, as well as in profile pose (annotated with a different markup of facial landmarks).
Abstract: In this paper, we present a new benchmark (Menpo benchmark) for facial landmark localisation and summarise the results of the recent competition, so-called Menpo Challenge, run in conjunction to CVPR 2017. The Menpo benchmark, contrary to the previous benchmarks such as 300-W and 300-VW, contains facial images both in (nearly) frontal, as well as in profile pose (annotated with a different markup of facial landmarks). Furthermore, we increase considerably the number of annotated images so that deep learning algorithms can be robustly applied to the problem. The results of the Menpo challenge demonstrate that recent deep learning architectures when trained with the abundance of data lead to excellent results. Finally, we discuss directions for future benchmarks in the topic.
165 citations
Cites methods from "Deep Alignment Network: A Convoluti..."
...Kowalski: The method in [27] used a VGG-based alignment network to correct similarity transforms and then a fully-convolutional network that regressed to the final shape....
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23 Jul 2020
TL;DR: COCO-WholeBody as discussed by the authors extends COCO dataset with whole-body annotations, including 133 dense landmarks with 68 on the face, 42 on hands and 23 on the body and feet.
Abstract: This paper investigates the task of 2D human whole-body pose estimation, which aims to localize dense landmarks on the entire human body including face, hands, body, and feet. As existing datasets do not have whole-body annotations, previous methods have to assemble different deep models trained independently on different datasets of the human face, hand, and body, struggling with dataset biases and large model complexity. To fill in this blank, we introduce COCO-WholeBody which extends COCO dataset with whole-body annotations. To our best knowledge, it is the first benchmark that has manual annotations on the entire human body, including 133 dense landmarks with 68 on the face, 42 on hands and 23 on the body and feet. A single-network model, named ZoomNet, is devised to take into account the hierarchical structure of the full human body to solve the scale variation of different body parts of the same person. ZoomNet is able to significantly outperform existing methods on the proposed COCO-WholeBody dataset. Extensive experiments show that COCO-WholeBody not only can be used to train deep models from scratch for whole-body pose estimation but also can serve as a powerful pre-training dataset for many different tasks such as facial landmark detection and hand keypoint estimation. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/jin-s13/COCO-WholeBody.
116 citations
References
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TL;DR: It is shown that dropout improves the performance of neural networks on supervised learning tasks in vision, speech recognition, document classification and computational biology, obtaining state-of-the-art results on many benchmark data sets.
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TL;DR: It is shown experimentally that grids of histograms of oriented gradient (HOG) descriptors significantly outperform existing feature sets for human detection, and the influence of each stage of the computation on performance is studied.
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31,952 citations
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