Face Detection, Bounding Box Aggregation and Pose Estimation for Robust Facial Landmark Localisation in the Wild

Abstract

We present a framework for robust face detection and landmark localisation of faces in the wild, which has been evaluated as part of 'the 2nd Facial Landmark Localisation Competition'. The framework has four stages: face detection, bounding box aggregation, pose estimation and landmark localisation. To achieve a high detection rate, we use two publicly available CNN-based face detectors and two proprietary detectors. We aggregate the detected face bounding boxes of each input image to reduce false positives and improve face detection accuracy. A cascaded shape regressor, trained using faces with a variety of pose variations, is then employed for pose estimation and image pre-processing. Last, we train the final cascaded shape regressor for fine-grained landmark localisation, using a large number of training samples with limited pose variations. The experimental results obtained on the 300W and Menpo benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our framework over state-of-the-art methods.