Fiducial point tracking for facial expression using multiple particle filters with kernel correlation analysis

Detecting and tracking fiducial points successfully can generate necessary dynamic and deformable information for facial image interpretation tasks with numerous potential applications. In this paper we propose an automatic fiducial points tracking method using multiple Differential Evolution Markov Chain (DE-MC) particle filters with kernel correlation techniques. Fiducial points are initialized through the scale invariant feature based detectors. By taking the advantage of the ability to approximate complicated proposal distributions, multiple DE-MC particle filters are applied for fiducial points tracking by building a path connecting sampling with measurements, based on the fact that the posteriori depends on both the previous state and the current observation. A Kernel correlation analysis approach is proposed to find the detection likelihood with maximization of the similarity criterion between the target points and the candidate points. Sampling efficiency is improved and computational time is substantially reduced by making use of the intermediate results obtained in particle allocation.