Face Alignment Across Large Poses: A 3D Solution

Xiangyu Zhu, Zhen Lei, Xiaoming Liu, Hailin Shi, Stan Z. Li; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016, pp. 146-155

Face alignment, which fits a face model to an image and extracts the semantic meanings of facial pixels, has been an important topic in CV community. However, most algorithms are designed for faces in small to medium poses (below 45 degree), lacking the ability to align faces in large-pose up to 90 degree. The challenges are three-fold: Firstly, the commonly used landmark-based face model assumes that all the landmarks are visible and is therefore not suitable for profile views. Secondly, the face appearance varies more dramatically in large poses, ranging from frontal view to profile view. Thirdly, labelling landmarks in large poses is an extremely challenging work since the invisible landmarks have to be guessed. In this paper, we propose a solution to the three problems in an new alignment framework, called 3D Dense Face Alignment (3DDFA), in which a dense 3D face model is fitted to the image via convolutional neutral network (CNN). We also propose a method to synthesize large-scale training samples in profile views to solve the third problem of data labelling. Experiments on the challenging AFLW database show that our approach achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods.