Exemplar-Based Graph Matching for Robust Facial Landmark Localization

Feng Zhou, Jonathan Brandt, Zhe Lin; Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013, pp. 1025-1032

Localizing facial landmarks is a fundamental step in facial image analysis. However, the problem is still challenging due to the large variability in pose and appearance, and the existence of occlusions in real-world face images. In this paper, we present exemplar-based graph matching (EGM), a robust framework for facial landmark localization. Compared to conventional algorithms, EGM has three advantages: (1) an affine-invariant shape constraint is learned online from similar exemplars to better adapt to the test face; (2) the optimal landmark configuration can be directly obtained by solving a graph matching problem with the learned shape constraint; (3) the graph matching problem can be optimized efficiently by linear programming. To our best knowledge, this is the first attempt to apply a graph matching technique for facial landmark localization. Experiments on several challenging datasets demonstrate the advantages of EGM over state-of-the-art methods.