Facial landmark localization based on hierarchical pose regression with cascaded random ferns

Abstract

The main challenge of facial landmark localization in real-world application is that the large changes of head pose and facial expressions cause substantial image appearance variations. To avoid high dimensional regression in the 3D and 2D facial pose spaces simultaneously, we propose a hierarchical pose regression approach, estimating the head rotation, facial components and landmarks hierarchically. The regression process works in a unified cascaded fern framework. We present generalized gradient boosted ferns (GBFs) for the regression framework, which give better performance than traditional ferns. The framework also achieves real time performance. We verify our method on the latest benchmark datasets. The results show that it outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and speed.