Abstract
This paper presents a joint head pose and facial landmark regression method with input from depth images for realtime application. Our main contributions are: firstly, a joint optimization method to estimate head pose and facial landmarks, i.e., the pose regression result provides supervised initialization for cascaded facial landmark regression, while the regression result for the facial landmarks can also help to further refine the head pose at each stage. Secondly, we classify the head pose space into 9 sub-spaces, and then use a cascaded random forest with a global shape constraint for training facial landmarks in each specific space. This classification-guided method can effectively handle the problem of large pose changes and occlusion. Lastly, we have built a 3D face database containing 73 subjects, each with 14 expressions in various head poses. Experiments on challenging databases show our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both head pose estimation and facial landmark regression.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Luo Jiang and Boyi Jiang for their help in constructing the 3DFEP database. We thank the ETHZ-Computer Vision Lab for permission to use the BIWI Kinect Head Pose database and BIWI 3D Audiovisual Corpus of Affective Communication database. This work was supported by the National Key Technologies R&D Program of China (No. 2016YFC0800501), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61672481).
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Jie Wang is currently an M.S. student in the School of Computer Science at the University of Science and Technology of China. Her research interest is in computer vision and machine learning.
Juyong Zhang is an associate professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Science and Technology of China. He received his Ph.D. degree from the School of Computer Science and Engineering at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Before that, he received his B.S. degree in computer science and engineering from the University of Science and Technology of China in 2006. His research interests fall into the areas of computer graphics, computer vision, and machine learning.
Changwei Luo is a research assistant in the Department of Automation at the University of Science and Technology of China. His research interests cover computer vision and human computer interaction.
Falai Chen is a professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Science and Technology of China. He received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Science and Technology of China in 1987, 1989, and 1994, respectively. His current research interests are in computer aided geometric design and geometric modeling, specifically, in algebraic methods in geometric modeling, splines over T-meshes and their applications to isogeometric analysis.
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Wang, J., Zhang, J., Luo, C. et al. Joint head pose and facial landmark regression from depth images. Comp. Visual Media 3, 229–241 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41095-017-0082-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41095-017-0082-8