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Locality-constrained framework for face alignment

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Abstract

Although the conventional active appearance model (AAM) has achieved some success for face alignment, it still suffers from the generalization problem when be applied to unseen subjects and images. To deal with the generalization problem of AAM, we first reformulate the original AAM as sparsity-regularized AAM, which can achieve more compact/better shape and appearance priors by selecting nearest neighbors as the bases of the shape and appearance model. To speed up the fitting procedure, the sparsity in sparsity-regularized AAM is approximated by using the locality (i.e., K-nearest neighbor), and thus inducing the locality-constrained active appearance-model (LC-AAM). The LC-AAM solves a constrained AAM-like fitting problem with the K-nearest neighbors as the bases of shape and appearance model. To alleviate the adverse influence of inaccurate K-nearest neighbor results, the locality constraint is further embedded in the discriminative fitting method denoted as LC-DFM, which can find better K-nearest neighbor results by employing shape-indexed feature, and can also tolerate some inaccurate neighbors benefited from the regression model rather than the generative model in AAM. Extensive experiments on several datasets demonstrate that our methods outperform the state-of-the-arts in both detection accuracy and generalization ability.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61650202, 61402443, 61672496), and the Strategic Priority Research Program of the CAS (XDB02070004).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China

    Jie Zhang, Meina Kan, Shiguang Shan, Xiujuan Chai & Xilin Chen

  2. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Jie Zhang

  3. Alibaba Group, Hangzhou, 311121, China

    Xiaowei Zhao

Authors
  1. Jie Zhang
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  2. Xiaowei Zhao
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  3. Meina Kan
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  4. Shiguang Shan
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  5. Xiujuan Chai
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  6. Xilin Chen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Shiguang Shan.

Additional information

Jie Zhang received the BS degree at China University of Geosciences, China in 2011. Currently, he is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. His research interests include deep learning and its application in face alignment, face recognition, object detection and localization.

Xiaowei Zhao received the PhD degree in computer science from the Institute of Computing Technology (ICT), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), China in 2013. He is currently a research engineer with Alibaba Group. His research interests include computer vision, pattern recognition. He especially focuses on face detection and face alignment, image and video analysis, etc.

Meina Kan is an Associate Professor with the Institute of Computing Technology (ICT), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). She received the PhD degree from the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), China. Her research mainly focuses on Computer Vision especially face recognition, transfer learning, and deep learning.

Shiguang Shan received MS degree in computer science from the Harbin Institute of Technology, China in 1999, and PhD degree in computer science from the Institute of Computing Technology (ICT), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), China in 2004. He joined ICT, CAS in 2002 and has been a professor since 2010. He is now the Deputy Director of the Key Lab of Intelligent Information Processing of CAS. His research interests cover computer vision, pattern recognition, and machine learning. He especially focuses on face recognition related research topics. He has published more than 200 papers in refereed journals and proceedings.

Xiujuan Chai received the BS, MS, and PhD degrees in computer science from the Harbin Institute of Technology, China in 2000, 2002, and 2007, respectively. She was a Post-doctorial researcher in Nokia Research Center(Beijing), from 2007 to 2009. She joined the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy Sciences, China in July 2009 and now she is an associate professor. Her research interests cover computer vision, pattern recognition, and multimodal human-computer interaction. She especially focuses on sign language recognition related research topics.

Xilin Chen received the BS, MS, and PhD degrees in computer science from the Harbin Institute of Technology, China in 1988, 1991, and 1994, respectively. He is a professor with the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). He has authored one book and over 200 papers in refereed journals and proceedings in the areas of computer vision, pattern recognition, image processing, and multimodal interfaces.

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Zhang, J., Zhao, X., Kan, M. et al. Locality-constrained framework for face alignment. Front. Comput. Sci. 13, 789–801 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-018-6617-z

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