BMVC 2004, Kingston, 7th-9th Sept, 2004

A Multi-Stage Approach to Facial Feature Detection
D. Cristinacce, T. Cootes and I. Scott (University of Manchester)

We describe a novel shape constraint technique which is incorporated into
a multi-stage algorithm to automatically locate features on the human face.
The method is coarse-to-fine. First a face detector is applied to find the approximate
scale and location of the face in the image. Then individual feature
detectors are applied and combined using a novel algorithm known as Pairwise
Reinforcement of Feature Responses (PRFR). The points predicted by
this method are then refined using a version of the Active Appearance Model
(AAM) search, which is tuned to edge and corner features. The final output
of the three stage algorithm is shown to give much better results than any
other combination of methods. The method outperforms previous published
results on the BIOID test set [11].
(pdf article)

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