Face Detection, Landmark Detection in CVPR 2019
[3dmm cvpr landmark-detection action-unit-detection deep-learning 2019 face-detection 
Face Detection
DSFD: Dual Shot Face Detector
Jian Li,Yabiao Wang,Changan Wang,Ying Tai,Jianjun Qian,Jian Yang,Chengjie Wang,Jilin Li,Feiyue Huang
Recently, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) has achieved great success in face detection. However, it remains a challenging problem for the current face detection methods owing to high degree of variability in scale, pose, occlusion, expression, appearance and illumination. In this Paper, we propose a novel detection network named Dual Shot face Detector(DSFD). which inherits the architecture of SSD and introduces a Feature Enhance Module (FEM) for transferring the original feature maps to extend the single shot detector to dual shot detector. Specially, progressive anchor loss (PAL) computed by using two set of anchors is adopted to effectively facilitate the features. Additionally, we propose an improved anchor matching (IAM) method by integrating novel data augmentation techniques and anchor design strategy in our DSFD to provide better initialization for the regressor. Extensive experiments on popular benchmarks: WIDER FACE (easy: 0.966, medium: 0.957, hard: 0.904) and FDDB ( discontinuous: 0.991, continuous: 0.862 ) demonstrate the superiority of DSFD over the state-of-the-art face detection methods (e.g., PyramidBox and SRN). Code will be made available upon publication.
Joint Face Detection and Facial Motion Retargeting for Multiple Faces
Facial motion retargeting is an important problem in both computer graphics and vision, which involves capturing the performance of a human face and transferring it to another 3D character. Learning 3D morphable model (3DMM) parameters from 2D face images using convolutional neural networks is common in 2D face alignment, 3D face reconstruction etc. However, existing methods either require an additional face detection step before retargeting or use a cascade of separate networks to perform detection followed by retargeting in a sequence. In this paper, we present a single end-to-end network to jointly predict the bounding box locations and 3DMM parameters for multiple faces. First, we design a novel multitask learning framework that learns a disentangled representation of 3DMM parameters for a single face. Then, we leverage the trained single face model to generate ground truth 3DMM parameters for multiple faces to train another network that performs joint face detection and motion retargeting for images with multiple faces. Experimental results show that our joint detection and retargeting network has high face detection accuracy and is robust to extreme expressions and poses while being faster than state-of-the-art methods.
Group Sampling for Scale Invariant Face Detection
Detectors based on deep learning tend to detect multi-scale faces on a single input image for efficiency. Recent works, such as FPN and SSD, generally use feature maps from multiple layers with different spatial resolutions to detect objects at different scales, e.g., high-resolution feature maps for small objects. However, we find that such multi-layer prediction is not necessary. Faces at all scales can be well detected with features from a single layer of the network. In this paper, we carefully examine the factors affecting face detection across a large range of scales, and conclude that the balance of training samples, including both positive and negative ones, at different scales is the key. We propose a group sampling method which divides the anchors into several groups according to the scale, and ensure that the number of samples for each group is the same during training. Our approach using only the last layer of FPN as features is able to advance the state-of-the-arts. Comprehensive analysis and extensive experiments have been conducted to show the effectiveness of the proposed method. Our approach, evaluated on face detection benchmarks including FDDB and WIDER FACE datasets, achieves state-of-the-art results without bells and whistles.
FA-RPN: Floating Region Proposals for Face Detection
We propose a novel approach for generating region proposals for performing face detection. Instead of classifying anchor boxes using features from a pixel in the convolutional feature map, we adopt a pooling-based approach for generating region proposals. However, pooling hundreds of thousands of anchors which are evaluated for generating proposals becomes a computational bottleneck during inference. To this end, an efficient anchor placement strategy for reducing the number of anchor-boxes is proposed. We then show that proposals generated by our network (Floating Anchor Region Proposal Network, FA-RPN) are better than RPN for generating region proposals for face detection. We discuss several beneficial features of FA-RPN proposals (which can be enabled without re-training) like iterative refinement, placement of fractional anchors and changing size/shape of anchors. Our face detector based on FA-RPN obtains 89.4% mAP with a ResNet-50 backbone on the WIDER dataset.
Landmark Detection
Semantic Alignment: Finding Semantically Consistent Ground-Truth for Facial Landmark Detection
Zhiwei Liu,Xiangyu Zhu,Guosheng Hu,Haiyun Guo,Ming Tang,Zhen Lei,Neil M. Robertson,Jinqiao Wang
Recently, deep learning based facial landmark detection has achieved great success. Despite this, we notice that the semantic ambiguity greatly degrades the detection performance. Specifically, the semantic ambiguity means that some landmarks (e.g. those evenly distributed along the face contour) do not have clear and accurate definition, causing the inconsistent annotations (random errors) introduced by annotators. Accordingly, these inconsistent annotations, which are usually provided by public databases, commonly work as the (inaccurate) groundtruth to supervise network training, leading to the degraded accuracy. To our knowledge, very little research has investigated this problem. In this paper, we propose a novel probabilistic model which introduces a latent variable, i.e. ‘real’ groundtruth which is semantically consistent, to optimize. This framework couples two parts (1) training landmark detection CNN and (2) searching the ‘real’ groundtruth. These two parts are alternatively optimized: the searched ‘real’ groundtruth supervises the CNN training; and the trained CNN assists the searching of ‘real’ groundtruth. In addition, to correct or recover the unconfidently predicted landmarks due to occlusion and low quality, we propose a global heatmap correction unit (GHCU) to correct outliers by considering the global face shape as a constraint. Extensive experiments on both image-based (300V and AFLW) and video-based (300VW) databases demonstrate that our method effectively improves the landmark detection accuracy and achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Robust Facial Landmark Detection via Occlusion-Adaptive Deep Networks
In this paper, we present a simple and effective framework called Occlusion-adaptive Deep Networks (ODN) with the purpose of solving the occlusion problem for facial landmark detection. In this model, the occlusion probability of each position in high-level features are inferred by a distillation module that can be learnt automatically in the process of estimating the relationship between facial appearance and facial shape. The occlusion probability serves as the adaptive weight on high-level features to reduce the impact of occlusion and obtain clean feature representation. Nevertheless, the clean feature representation cannot represent the holistic face due to the missing semantic features. To obtain exhaustive and complete feature representation, it is vital that we leverage a low-rank learning module to recover lost features. Considering that facial geometric characteristics are conducive to the low-rank module to recover lost features, we propose a geometry-aware module to excavate geometric relationships between different facial components. Depending on the synergistic effect of three modules, the proposed network achieves better performance in comparison to state-of-the-art methods on challenging benchmark datasets.
Action Unit Detection
Self-Supervised Representation Learning From Videos for Facial Action Unit Detection
In this paper, we aim to learn discriminative representation for facial action unit (AU) detection from large amount of videos without manual annotations. Inspired by the fact that facial actions are the movements of facial muscles, we depict the movements as the transformation between two face images in different frames and use it as the self-supervisory signal to learn the representations. However, under the uncontrolled condition, the transformation is caused by both facial actions and head motions. To remove the influence by head motions, we propose a Twin-Cycle Autoencoder (TCAE) that can disentangle the facial action related movements and the head motion related ones. Specifically, TCAE is trained to respectively change the facial actions and head poses of the source face to those of the target face. Our experiments validate TCAE’s capability of decoupling the movements. Experimental results also demonstrate that the learned representation is discriminative for AU detection, where TCAE outperforms or is comparable with the state-of-the-art self-supervised learning methods and supervised AU detection methods.
Local Relationship Learning With Person-Specific Shape Regularization for Facial Action Unit Detection
Encoding individual facial expressions via action units (AUs) coded by the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) has been found to be an effective approach in resolving the ambiguity issue among different expressions. While a number of methods have been proposed for AU detection, robust AU detection in the wild remains a challenging problem because of the diverse baseline AU intensities across individual subjects, and the weakness of appearance signal of AUs. To resolve these issues, in this work, we propose a novel AU detection method by utilizing local information and the relationship of individual local face regions. Through such a local relationship learning, we expect to utilize rich local information to improve the AU detection robustness against the potential perceptual inconsistency of individual local regions. In addition, considering the diversity in the baseline AU intensities of individual subjects, we further regularize local relationship learning via person-specific face shape information, i.e., reducing the influence of person-specific shape information, and obtaining more AU discriminative features. The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on two widely used AU detection datasets in the public domain (BP4D and DISFA).
Joint Representation and Estimator Learning for Facial Action Unit Intensity Estimation
Yong Zhang,Baoyuan Wu,Weiming Dong,Zhifeng Li,Wei Liu,Bao-Gang Hu,Qiang Ji
Facial action unit (AU) intensity is an index to characterize human expressions. Accurate AU intensity estimation depends on three major elements: image representation, intensity estimator, and supervisory information. Most existing methods learn intensity estimator with fixed image representation, and rely on the availability of fully annotated supervisory information. In this paper, a novel general framework for AU intensity estimation is presented, which differs from traditional estimation methods in two aspects. First, rather than keeping image representation fixed, it simultaneously learns representation and intensity estimator to achieve an optimal solution. Second, it allows incorporating weak supervisory training signal from human knowledge (e.g. feature smoothness, label smoothness, label ranking, and positive label), which makes our model trainable even fully annotated information is not available. More specifically, human knowledge is represented as either soft or hard constraints which are encoded as regularization terms or equality/inequality constraints, respectively. On top of our novel framework, we additionally propose an efficient algorithm for optimization based on Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM). Evaluations on two benchmark databases show that our method outperforms competing methods under different ratios of AU intensity annotations, especially for small ratios.
3DMM
Boosting Local Shape Matching for Dense 3D Face Correspondence
Dense 3D face correspondence is a fundamental and challenging issue in the literature of 3D face analysis. Correspondence between two 3D faces can be viewed as a non-rigid registration problem that one deforms into the other, which is commonly guided by a few facial landmarks in many existing works. However, the current works seldom consider the problem of incoherent deformation caused by landmarks. In this paper, we explicitly formulate the deformation as locally rigid motions guided by some seed points, and the formulated deformation satisfies coherent local motions everywhere on a face. The seed points are initialized by a few landmarks, and are then augmented to boost shape matching between the template and the target face step by step, to finally achieve dense correspondence. In each step, we employ a hierarchical scheme for local shape registration, together with a Gaussian reweighting strategy for accurate matching of local features around the seed points. In our experiments, we evaluate the proposed method extensively on several datasets, including two publicly available ones: FRGC v2.0 and BU-3DFE. The experimental results demonstrate that our method can achieve accurate feature correspondence, coherent local shape motion, and compact data representation. These merits actually settle some important issues for practical applications, such as expressions, noise, and partial data.
Combining 3D Morphable Models: A Large Scale Face-And-Head Model
Stylianos Ploumpis,Haoyang Wang,Nick Pears,William A. P. Smith,Stefanos Zafeiriou
Three-dimensional Morphable Models (3DMMs) are powerful statistical tools for representing the 3D surfaces of an object class. In this context, we identify an interesting question that has previously not received research attention: is it possible to combine two or more 3DMMs that (a) are built using different templates that perhaps only partly overlap, (b) have different representation capabilities and (c) are built from different datasets that may not be publicly-available? In answering this question, we make two contributions. First, we propose two methods for solving this problem: i. use a regressor to complete missing parts of one model using the other, ii. use the Gaussian Process framework to blend covariance matrices from multiple models. Second, as an example application of our approach, we build a new head and face model that combines the variability and facial detail of the LSFM with the full head modelling of the LYHM. The resulting combined model achieves state-of-the-art performance and outperforms existing head models by a large margin. Finally, as an application experiment, we reconstruct full head representations from single, unconstrained images by utilizing our proposed large-scale model in conjunction with the Face-Warehouse blendshapes for handling expressions.