Regressive Tree Structured Model for Facial Landmark Localization

Although the Tree Structured Model (TSM) is proven effective for solving face detection, pose estimation and landmark localization in an unified model, its sluggish run time makes it unfavorable in practical applications, especially when dealing with cases of multiple faces. We propose the Regressive Tree Structure Model (RTSM) to improve the run-time speed and localization accuracy. The RTSM is composed of two component TSMs, the coarse TSM (c-TSM) and the refined TSM (r-TSM), and a Bilateral Support Vector Regressor (BSVR). The c-TSM is built on the low-resolution octaves of samples so that it provides coarse but fast face detection. The r-TSM is built on the mid-resolution octaves so that it can locate the landmarks on the face candidates given by the c-TSM and improve precision. The r-TSM based landmarks are used in the forward BSVR as references to locate the dense set of landmarks, which are then used in the backward BSVR to relocate the landmarks with large localization errors. The forward and backward regression goes on iteratively until convergence. The performance of the RTSM is validated on three benchmark databases, the Multi-PIE, LFPW and AFW, and compared with the latest TSM to demonstrate its efficacy.