Exemplar-Based Face Parsing

Brandon M. Smith, Li Zhang, Jonathan Brandt, Zhe Lin, Jianchao Yang; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013, pp. 3484-3491

In this work, we propose an exemplar-based face image segmentation algorithm. We take inspiration from previous works on image parsing for general scenes. Our approach assumes a database of exemplar face images, each of which is associated with a hand-labeled segmentation map. Given a test image, our algorithm first selects a subset of exemplar images from the database, Our algorithm then computes a nonrigid warp for each exemplar image to align it with the test image. Finally, we propagate labels from the exemplar images to the test image in a pixel-wise manner, using trained weights to modulate and combine label maps from different exemplars. We evaluate our method on two challenging datasets and compare with two face parsing algorithms and a general scene parsing algorithm. We also compare our segmentation results with contour-based face alignment results; that is, we first run the alignment algorithms to extract contour points and then derive segments from the contours. Our algorithm compares favorably with all previous works on all datasets evaluated.