Look at Boundary: A Boundary-Aware Face Alignment Algorithm

We present a novel boundary-aware face alignment algorithm by utilising boundary lines as the geometric structure of a human face to help facial landmark localisation. Unlike the conventional heatmap based method and regression based method, our approach derives face landmarks from boundary lines which remove the ambiguities in the landmark definition. Three questions are explored and answered by this work: 1. Why using boundary? 2. How to use boundary? 3. What is the relationship between boundary estimation and landmarks localisation? Our boundary- aware face alignment algorithm achieves 3.49% mean error on 300-W Fullset, which outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. Our method can also easily integrate information from other datasets. By utilising boundary information of 300-W dataset, our method achieves 3.92% mean error with 0.39% failure rate on COFW dataset, and 1.25% mean error on AFLW-Full dataset. Moreover, we propose a new dataset WFLW to unify training and testing across different factors, including poses, expressions, illuminations, makeups, occlusions, and blurriness. Dataset and model will be publicly available at https://wywu.github.io/projects/LAB/LAB.html

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Datasets


Introduced in the Paper:

WFLW

Used in the Paper:

300W COFW AFLW-19

Results from the Paper


Ranked #4 on Face Alignment on AFLW-19 (using extra training data)

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Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Uses Extra
Training Data
Benchmark
Face Alignment AFLW-19 LAB (w/ B) NME_diag (%, Full) 1.25 # 4
NME_diag (%, Frontal) 1.14 # 5
Face Alignment AFLW-19 LAB (w/o B) NME_diag (%, Full) 1.85 # 15
NME_diag (%, Frontal) 1.62 # 10

Results from Other Papers


Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Rank Uses Extra
Training Data
Source Paper Compare
Face Alignment 300W LAB NME_inter-ocular (%, Full) 3.49 # 29
NME_inter-ocular (%, Common) 2.98 # 27
NME_inter-ocular (%, Challenge) 5.19 # 27
NME_inter-pupil (%, Full) 4.12 # 8
NME_inter-pupil (%, Common) 3.42 # 2
NME_inter-pupil (%, Challenge) 6.98 # 10
Face Alignment COFW LAB NME (inter-ocular) 5.58% # 21
Face Alignment WFLW LAB NME (inter-ocular) 5.27 # 29
AUC@10 (inter-ocular) 53.2 # 23
FR@10 (inter-ocular) 7.56 # 24
Face Alignment COFW LAB (w/ B) NME (inter-ocular) 3.92% # 18

Methods