Pose aided deep convolutional neural networks for face alignment

Abstract

Recently, deep convolutional neural networks have been widely used and achieved state-of-the-art performance in face recognition tasks such as face verification, face detection and face alignment. However, face alignment remains a challenging problem due to large pose variation and the lack of data. Although researchers have designed various network architecture to handle this problem, pose information was rarely used explicitly. In this paper, we propose Pose Aided Convolutional Neural Networks (PACN) which uses different networks for faces with different poses. We first train a CNN to do pose classification and a base CNN, then different networks are finetuned from the base CNN for faces of different pose. Since there wouldn’t be many images for each pose, we propose a data augmentation strategy which augment the data without affecting the pose. Experiment results show that the proposed PACN achieves better or comparable results than the state-of-the-art methods.