Automated Facial Feature Detection from Portrait and Range Images

We propose a novel technique to detect feature points from portrait and range representations of the face. In this technique, the appearance of each feature point is encoded using a set of Gabor wavelet responses extracted at multiple orientations and spatial frequencies. A vector of Gabor coefficients, called a jet, is computed at each pixel in the search window on a fiducial and compared with a set of jets, called a bunch, collected from a set of training data on the same type of fiducial. The desired feature point is located at the pixel whose jet is the most similar to the training bunch. This is the first time that Gabor wavelet responses were used to detect facial landmarks from range images. This method was tested on 1146 pairs of range and portrait images and high detection accuracies are achieved using a small number of training images. It is shown that co-localization using Gabor jets on range and portrait images resulted in better accuracy than using any single image modality. The obtained accuracies are competitive to that of other techniques in the literature.