Automatic landmark location with a Combined Active Shape Model

Automatic facial landmark location is a difficult challenge for realistic face recognition applications, where the face is recorded under variable illumination conditions including indoor and outdoor recordings and also with some pose and scale variability. Moreover, the image distortion and complex background also bring some difficulty both for landmark location and face recognition. The proposed landmark detection method, called combined active shape models, is robust to illumination, translation, and rotation. It exploits the scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) [1] and the active shape model (ASM). In order to have a better representation of face images, the landmarks on the face region and the face contour are modeled and processed separately. The performance of the proposed combined-ASM algorithm is tested on the BioID and FRGCv2.0 face image databases.