Existing methods for capturing datasets of 3D heads in dense semantic correspondence are slow, and commonly address the problem in two separate steps; multi-view stereo (MVS) reconstruction followed by non-rigid registration. To simplify this process, we introduce TEMPEH (Towards Estimation of 3D Meshes from Performances of Expressive Heads) to directly infer 3D heads in dense correspondence from calibrated multi-view images. Registering datasets of 3D scans typically requires manual parameter tuning to find the right balance between accurately fitting the scans surfaces and being robust to scanning noise and outliers. Instead, we propose to jointly register a 3D head dataset while training TEMPEH. Specifically, during training we minimize a geometric loss commonly used for surface registration, effectively leveraging TEMPEH as a regularizer. Our multi-view head inference builds on a volumetric feature representation that samples and fuses features from each view using camera calibration information. To account for partial occlusions and a large capture volume that enables head movements, we use view- and surface-aware feature fusion, and a spatial transformer-based head localization module, respectively. We use raw MVS scans as supervision during training, but, once trained, TEMPEH directly predicts 3D heads in dense correspondence without requiring scans. Predicting one head takes about 0.3 seconds with a median reconstruction error of 0.26 mm, 64% lower than the current state-of-the-art. This enables the efficient capture of large datasets containing multiple people and diverse facial motions. Code, model, and data are publicly available at https://tempeh.is.tue.mpg.de.
This work studies learning from a synergy process of 3D Morphable Models (3DMM) and 3D facial landmarks to predict complete 3D facial geometry, including 3D alignment, face orientation, and 3D face modeling. Our synergy process leverages a representation cycle for 3DMM parameters and 3D landmarks. 3D landmarks can be extracted and refined from face meshes built by 3DMM parameters. We next reverse the representation direction and show that predicting 3DMM parameters from sparse 3D landmarks improves the information flow. Together we create a synergy process that utilizes the relation between 3D landmarks and 3DMM parameters, and they collaboratively contribute to better performance. We extensively validate our contribution on full tasks of facial geometry prediction and show our superior and robust performance on these tasks for various scenarios. Particularly, we adopt only simple and widely-used network operations to attain fast and accurate facial geometry prediction. Codes and data: https://choyingw.github.io/works/SynergyNet/
Three-dimensional face dense alignment and reconstruction in the wild is a challenging problem as partial facial information is commonly missing in occluded and large pose face images. Large head pose variations also increase the solution space and make the modeling more difficult. Our key idea is to model occlusion and pose to decompose this challenging task into several relatively more manageable subtasks. To this end, we propose an end-to-end framework, termed as Self-aligned Dual face Regression Network (SADRNet), which predicts a pose-dependent face, a pose-independent face. They are combined by an occlusion-aware self-alignment to generate the final 3D face. Extensive experiments on two popular benchmarks, AFLW2000-3D and Florence, demonstrate that the proposed method achieves significant superior performance over existing state-of-the-art methods.
We propose real-time, six degrees of freedom (6DoF), 3D face pose estimation without face detection or landmark localization. We observe that estimating the 6DoF rigid transformation of a face is a simpler problem than facial landmark detection, often used for 3D face alignment. In addition, 6DoF offers more information than face bounding box labels. We leverage these observations to make multiple contributions: (a) We describe an easily trained, efficient, Faster R-CNN--based model which regresses 6DoF pose for all faces in the photo, without preliminary face detection. (b) We explain how pose is converted and kept consistent between the input photo and arbitrary crops created while training and evaluating our model. (c) Finally, we show how face poses can replace detection bounding box training labels. Tests on AFLW2000-3D and BIWI show that our method runs at real-time and outperforms state of the art (SotA) face pose estimators. Remarkably, our method also surpasses SotA models of comparable complexity on the WIDER FACE detection benchmark, despite not been optimized on bounding box labels.
While current monocular 3D face reconstruction methods can recover fine geometric details, they suffer several limitations. Some methods produce faces that cannot be realistically animated because they do not model how wrinkles vary with expression. Other methods are trained on high-quality face scans and do not generalize well to in-the-wild images. We present the first approach that regresses 3D face shape and animatable details that are specific to an individual but change with expression. Our model, DECA (Detailed Expression Capture and Animation), is trained to robustly produce a UV displacement map from a low-dimensional latent representation that consists of person-specific detail parameters and generic expression parameters, while a regressor is trained to predict detail, shape, albedo, expression, pose and illumination parameters from a single image. To enable this, we introduce a novel detail-consistency loss that disentangles person-specific details from expression-dependent wrinkles. This disentanglement allows us to synthesize realistic person-specific wrinkles by controlling expression parameters while keeping person-specific details unchanged. DECA is learned from in-the-wild images with no paired 3D supervision and achieves state-of-the-art shape reconstruction accuracy on two benchmarks. Qualitative results on in-the-wild data demonstrate DECA's robustness and its ability to disentangle identity- and expression-dependent details enabling animation of reconstructed faces. The model and code are publicly available at https://deca.is.tue.mpg.de.
3D face alignment of monocular images is a crucial process in the recognition of faces with disguise.3D face reconstruction facilitated by alignment can restore the face structure which is helpful in detcting disguise interference.This paper proposes a dual attention mechanism and an efficient end-to-end 3D face alignment framework.We build a stable network model through Depthwise Separable Convolution, Densely Connected Convolutional and Lightweight Channel Attention Mechanism. In order to enhance the ability of the network model to extract the spatial features of the face region, we adopt Spatial Group-wise Feature enhancement module to improve the representation ability of the network. Different loss functions are applied jointly to constrain the 3D parameters of a 3D Morphable Model (3DMM) and its 3D vertices. We use a variety of data enhancement methods and generate large virtual pose face data sets to solve the data imbalance problem. The experiments on the challenging AFLW,AFLW2000-3D datasets show that our algorithm significantly improves the accuracy of 3D face alignment. Our experiments using the field DFW dataset show that DAMDNet exhibits excellent performance in the 3D alignment and reconstruction of challenging disguised faces.The model parameters and the complexity of the proposed method are also reduced significantly.The code is publicly available at https:// github.com/LeiJiangJNU/DAMDNet
Our goal is to design architectures that retain the groundbreaking performance of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for landmark localization and at the same time are lightweight, compact and suitable for applications with limited computational resources. To this end, we make the following contributions: (a) we are the first to study the effect of neural network binarization on localization tasks, namely human pose estimation and face alignment. We exhaustively evaluate various design choices, identify performance bottlenecks, and more importantly propose multiple orthogonal ways to boost performance. (b) Based on our analysis, we propose a novel hierarchical, parallel and multi-scale residual architecture that yields large performance improvement over the standard bottleneck block while having the same number of parameters, thus bridging the gap between the original network and its binarized counterpart. (c) We perform a large number of ablation studies that shed light on the properties and the performance of the proposed block. (d) We present results for experiments on the most challenging datasets for human pose estimation and face alignment, reporting in many cases state-of-the-art performance. (e) We further provide additional results for the problem of facial part segmentation. Code can be downloaded from https://www.adrianbulat.com/binary-cnn-landmark
This paper describes our submission to the 1st 3D Face Alignment in the Wild (3DFAW) Challenge. Our method builds upon the idea of convolutional part heatmap regression [1], extending it for 3D face alignment. Our method decomposes the problem into two parts: (a) X,Y (2D) estimation and (b) Z (depth) estimation. At the first stage, our method estimates the X,Y coordinates of the facial landmarks by producing a set of 2D heatmaps, one for each landmark, using convolutional part heatmap regression. Then, these heatmaps, alongside the input RGB image, are used as input to a very deep subnetwork trained via residual learning for regressing the Z coordinate. Our method ranked 1st in the 3DFAW Challenge, surpassing the second best result by more than 22%.
We show how a simple convolutional neural network (CNN) can be trained to accurately and robustly regress 6 degrees of freedom (6DoF) 3D head pose, directly from image intensities. We further explain how this FacePoseNet (FPN) can be used to align faces in 2D and 3D as an alternative to explicit facial landmark detection for these tasks. We claim that in many cases the standard means of measuring landmark detector accuracy can be misleading when comparing different face alignments. Instead, we compare our FPN with existing methods by evaluating how they affect face recognition accuracy on the IJB-A and IJB-B benchmarks: using the same recognition pipeline, but varying the face alignment method. Our results show that (a) better landmark detection accuracy measured on the 300W benchmark does not necessarily imply better face recognition accuracy. (b) Our FPN provides superior 2D and 3D face alignment on both benchmarks. Finally, (c), FPN aligns faces at a small fraction of the computational cost of comparably accurate landmark detectors. For many purposes, FPN is thus a far faster and far more accurate face alignment method than using facial landmark detectors.
This paper investigates how far a very deep neural network is from attaining close to saturating performance on existing 2D and 3D face alignment datasets. To this end, we make the following 5 contributions: (a) we construct, for the first time, a very strong baseline by combining a state-of-the-art architecture for landmark localization with a state-of-the-art residual block, train it on a very large yet synthetically expanded 2D facial landmark dataset and finally evaluate it on all other 2D facial landmark datasets. (b) We create a guided by 2D landmarks network which converts 2D landmark annotations to 3D and unifies all existing datasets, leading to the creation of LS3D-W, the largest and most challenging 3D facial landmark dataset to date ~230,000 images. (c) Following that, we train a neural network for 3D face alignment and evaluate it on the newly introduced LS3D-W. (d) We further look into the effect of all "traditional" factors affecting face alignment performance like large pose, initialization and resolution, and introduce a "new" one, namely the size of the network. (e) We show that both 2D and 3D face alignment networks achieve performance of remarkable accuracy which is probably close to saturating the datasets used. Training and testing code as well as the dataset can be downloaded from https://www.adrianbulat.com/face-alignment/
We present a method that can evaluate a RANSAC hypothesis in constant time, i.e. independent of the size of the data. A key observation here is that correct hypotheses are tightly clustered together in the latent parameter domain. In a manner similar to the generalized Hough transform we seek to find this cluster, only that we need as few as two votes for a successful detection. Rapidly locating such pairs of similar hypotheses is made possible by adapting the recent "Random Grids" range-search technique. We only perform the usual (costly) hypothesis verification stage upon the discovery of a close pair of hypotheses. We show that this event rarely happens for incorrect hypotheses, enabling a significant speedup of the RANSAC pipeline. The suggested approach is applied and tested on three robust estimation problems: camera localization, 3D rigid alignment and 2D-homography estimation. We perform rigorous testing on both synthetic and real datasets, demonstrating an improvement in efficiency without a compromise in accuracy. Furthermore, we achieve state-of-the-art 3D alignment results on the challenging "Redwood" loop-closure challenge.