Adaptive Weighted Face Alignment by Multi-Scale Feature and Offset Prediction

Abstract

Traditional heatmap regression methods have some problems such as the lower limit of theoretical error and the lack of global constraints, which may lead to the collapse of the results in practical application. In this paper, we develop a facial landmark detection model aided by offset prediction to constrain the global shape. First, the hybrid detection model is used to roughly locate the initial coordinates predicted by the backbone network. At the same time, the head rotation attitude prediction module is added to the backbone network, and the Euler angle is used as the adaptive weight to modify the loss function so that the model has better robustness to the large pose image. Then, we introduce an offset prediction network. It uses the heatmap corresponding to the initial coordinates as an attention mask to fuze with the features, so the network can focus on the area around landmarks. This model shares the global features and regresses the offset relative to the real coordinates based on the initial coordinates to further enhance the continuity. In addition, we also add a multi-scale feature pre-extraction module to preprocess features so that we can increase feature scales and receptive fields. Experiments on several challenging public datasets show that our method gets better performance than the existing detection methods, confirming the effectiveness of our method.