Existing deep learning based facial landmark detection methods have achieved excellent performance. These methods, however, do not explicitly embed the structural dependencies among landmark points. They hence cannot preserve the geometric relationships between landmark points or generalize well to challenging conditions or unseen data. This paper proposes a method for deep structured facial landmark detection based on combining a deep Convolutional Network with a Conditional Random Field. We demonstrate its superior performance to existing state-of-the-art techniques in facial landmark detection, especially a better generalization ability on challenging datasets that include large pose and occlusion.

Deep structured models are widely used for tasks like semantic segmentation, where explicit correlations between variables provide important prior information which generally helps to reduce the data needs of deep nets. However, current deep structured models are restricted by oftentimes very local neighborhood structure, which cannot be increased for computational complexity reasons, and by the fact that the output configuration, or a representation thereof, cannot be transformed further. Very recent approaches which address those issues include graphical model inference inside deep nets so as to permit subsequent non-linear output space transformations. However, optimization of those formulations is challenging and not well understood. Here, we develop a novel model which generalizes existing approaches, such as structured prediction energy networks, and discuss a formulation which maintains applicability of existing inference techniques.

The integration of convnets with the conditional random fields to model the structural dependencies of facial landmarks during face alignment is nice contribution. Previously proposed methods in this direction were hybrid systems (eg. OpenFace versions) and not fully integrated. The authors evaluate on multiple datasets (300W, 300W-Video, Menpo & COFW-68) and compare results with other methods. Both inter- and cross-dataset performance are provided.

The authors did a good job of addressing reviewer concerns in their rebuttal and the reviewers converged towards an accept recommendation.

Existing deep learning based facial landmark detection methods have achieved excellent performance. These methods, however, do not explicitly embed the structural dependencies among landmark points. They hence cannot preserve the geometric relationships between landmark points or generalize well to challenging conditions or unseen data. This paper proposes a method for deep structured facial landmark detection based on combining a deep Convolutional Network with a Conditional Random Field. We demonstrate its superior performance to existing state-of-the-art techniques in facial landmark detection, especially a better generalization ability on challenging datasets that include large pose and occlusion.

This paper studies the problem of training deep structured models (models where the dependencies between the output variables are explicitly modelled and some components are modelled via neural networks). The key idea of this paper is to give up the standard modelling assumption of structured prediction: the score (or the energy) function is the sum of summands (potentials). Instead of using the sum the paper puts an arbitrary non-linear (a neural network) transformation on top of the potentials. The paper develops an inference (MAP prediction) technique for such models which is based on Lagrangian decomposition (often referred to as dual decomposition, see details below). The training of the model is done by combining this inference technique with the standard Structure SVM (SSVM) objective.

Existing deep learning based facial landmark detection methods have achieved excellent performance. These methods, however, do not explicitly embed the structural dependencies among landmark points. They hence cannot preserve the geometric relationships between landmark points or generalize well to challenging conditions or unseen data. This paper proposes a method for deep structured facial landmark detection based on combining a deep Convolutional Network with a Conditional Random Field. We demonstrate its superior performance to existing state-of-the-art techniques in facial landmark detection, especially a better generalization ability on challenging datasets that include large pose and occlusion.

Deep structured models are widely used for tasks like semantic segmentation, where explicit correlations between variables provide important prior information which generally helps to reduce the data needs of deep nets. However, current deep structured models are restricted by oftentimes very local neighborhood structure, which cannot be increased for computational complexity reasons, and by the fact that the output configuration, or a representation thereof, cannot be transformed further. Very recent approaches which address those issues include graphical model inference inside deep nets so as to permit subsequent non-linear output space transformations. However, optimization of those formulations is challenging and not well understood. Here, we develop a novel model which generalizes existing approaches, such as structured prediction energy networks, and discuss a formulation which maintains applicability of existing inference techniques. Papers published at the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference.