Cascaded Shape Space Pruning for Robust Facial Landmark Detection

In this paper, we propose a novel cascaded face shape space pruning algorithm for robust facial landmark detection. Through progressively excluding the incorrect candidate shapes, our algorithm can accurately and efficiently achieve the globally optimal shape configuration. Specifically, individual landmark detectors are firstly applied to eliminate wrong candidates for each landmark. Then, the candidate shape space is further pruned by jointly removing incorrect shape configurations. To achieve this purpose, a discriminative structure classifier is designed to assess the candidate shape configurations. Based on the learned discriminative structure classifier, an efficient shape space pruning strategy is proposed to quickly reject most incorrect candidate shapes while preserve the true shape. The proposed algorithm is carefully evaluated on a large set of real world face images. In addition, comparison results on the publicly available BioID and LFW face databases demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms some state-of-the-art algorithms.