Localization of Facial Landmarks in Depth Images Using Gated Multiple Ridge Descent

A novel method for automatic facial landmark localization is presented. The method builds on the supervised descent framework, which was shown to successfully localize landmarks in the presence of large expression variations and mild occlusions, but struggles when localizing landmarks on faces with large pose variations. We propose an extension of the supervised descent framework that trains multiple descent maps and results in increased robustness to pose variations. The performance of the proposed method is demonstrated on the Bosphorus, the FRGC and the UND data sets for the problem of facial landmark localization from 3D data. Our experimental results show that the proposed method exhibits increased robustness to pose variations, while retaining high performance in the case of expression and occlusion variations.