English

Subpixel Heatmap Regression for Facial Landmark Localization

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2021-11-04 v1

Abstract

Deep Learning models based on heatmap regression have revolutionized the task of facial landmark localization with existing models working robustly under large poses, non-uniform illumination and shadows, occlusions and self-occlusions, low resolution and blur. However, despite their wide adoption, heatmap regression approaches suffer from discretization-induced errors related to both the heatmap encoding and decoding process. In this work we show that these errors have a surprisingly large negative impact on facial alignment accuracy. To alleviate this problem, we propose a new approach for the heatmap encoding and decoding process by leveraging the underlying continuous distribution. To take full advantage of the newly proposed encoding-decoding mechanism, we also introduce a Siamese-based training that enforces heatmap consistency across various geometric image transformations. Our approach offers noticeable gains across multiple datasets setting a new state-of-the-art result in facial landmark localization. Code alongside the pretrained models will be made available at https://www.adrianbulat.com/face-alignment

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2111.02360,
  title  = {Subpixel Heatmap Regression for Facial Landmark Localization},
  author = {Adrian Bulat and Enrique Sanchez and Georgios Tzimiropoulos},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.02360},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

Accepted at BMVC 2021

R2 v1 2026-06-24T07:24:48.239Z