Facial landmarks localization using cascaded neural networks

The accurate localization of facial landmarks is at the core of several 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 two paired cascaded subnetworks with convolutional neural network units. The cascaded units of the first subnetwork estimate heatmap-based encodings of the landmarks’ locations, while the cascaded units of the second subnetwork receive as inputs the outputs of the corresponding heatmap estimation units, and refine them through regression. The proposed scheme is experimentally shown to compare favorably with contemporary state-of-the-art schemes, especially when applied to images depicting challenging localization conditions.