Facial Landmark Localization in the Wild by Backbone-Branches Representation Learning

Abstract

Facial landmark localization plays a critical role in face recognition and analysis. In this paper, we propose a novel cascaded Backbone-Branches Fully Convolutional Neural Network (BB-FCN) for rapidly and accurately localizing facial landmarks in unconstrained and cluttered settings. Our proposed BB-FCN generates facial landmark response maps directly from raw images without any pre-processing. It follows a coarse-to-fine cascaded pipeline, which consists of a backbone network for roughly detecting the locations of all facial landmarks and one branch network for each type of detected landmarks for further refining their locations. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that our proposed BB-FCN can significantly outperform the state of the art under both constrained (i.e. within detected facial regions only) and unconstrained settings.