Face Alignment across Large Pose via MT-CNN Based 3D Shape Reconstruction
Face alignment plays an important role for robust face recognition and analysis applications in the wild. While a number of face alignment methods are available, large-pose face alignment remains a very challenging problem due to the ambiguity of facial keypoints in 2D face images. Recent attempts to solve this problem via 3D model fitting show more robustness against large poses and 2D ambiguity, but their accuracy and speed are still limited. We propose a 3D reconstruction based method to quickly and accurately detect 2D facial landmarks and estimate their visibilities. By designing a cascaded multi-task CNN model, we can efficiently reconstruct the 3D face shape, together with pose estimation as an auxiliary task. Finally, the landmarks on 3D shape are projected to the 2D face image to get the 2D landmarks and their visibilities. Experimental results on the challenging 300W-LP, AFLW2000-3D, and AFLW databases show that the proposed approach can be comparable with the state-of-the-art methods and is able to run in real time (32ms per image) on 3.4 GHz CPU.