Leveraging geometric correlation for input-adaptive facial landmark regression

Facial analysis plays very important role in many vision applications, such as authentication and entertainments. The very early works in the 1990s mostly focus on estimating geometric deformations of facial landmarks to address this task. While in the past several years, more and more efforts have been made to directly learn an appearance regression for facial analysis. Though training regressions on controlled facial images can successfully capture the appearance variations, the performance of these appearance-based models are tightly related to the quantity and quality of the training data. In this paper, we develop a novel framework, named geometric correlated landmark regression (GCLR), to inherit the advantages but overcome limitations of these two categories of methods. Specifically, we first establish a landmark-to-landmark regression to estimate the geometry of facial images. By further incorporating a sparse coding term into the regression framework, we can successfully leverage the geometric correlations between the test image and the shape dictionary, thus significantly enhance the geometry regression performance. Experimental results on various challenging facial data sets verify the effectiveness and efficiency of GCLR.