Facial Landmarks Localization using Cascaded Neural Networks

The accurate localization of facial landmarks is at the core of face analysis tasks, such as face recognition and facial expression analysis, to name a few. In this work we propose a novel localization approach based on a Deep Learning architecture that utilizes dual cascaded CNN subnetworks of the same length, where each subnetwork in a cascade refines the accuracy of its predecessor. The first set of cascaded subnetworks estimates heatmaps that encode the landmarks' locations, while the second set of cascaded subnetworks refines the heatmaps-based localization using regression, and also receives as input the output of the corresponding heatmap estimation subnetwork. The proposed scheme is experimentally shown to compare favorably with contemporary state-of-the-art schemes.