期刊名称：International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems
印刷版ISSN：1729-8806
电子版ISSN：1729-8814
出版年度：2020
卷号：17
期号：4
页码：1-11
DOI：10.1177/1729881420940900
出版社：SAGE Publications
摘要：Facial landmark localization is still a challenge task in the unconstrained environment with influences of significant variation conditions such as facial pose, shape, expression, illumination, and occlusions. In this work, we present an improved boundary-aware face alignment method by using stacked dense U-Nets. The proposed method consists of two stages: a boundary heatmap estimation stage to learn the facial boundary lines and a facial landmark localization stage to predict the final face alignment result. With the constraint of boundary lines, facial landmarks are unified as a whole facial shape. Hence, the unseen landmarks in a shape with occlusions can be better estimated by message passing with other landmarks. By introducing the stacked dense U-Nets for feature extraction, the capacity of the model is improved. Experiments and comparisons on public datasets show that the proposed method obtains better performance than the baselines, especially for facial images with large pose variation, shape variation, and occlusions.
