From pixels to response maps: discriminative image filtering for face alignment in the wild

We propose a face alignment framework that relies on the texture model generated by the responses of discriminatively trained part-based filters. Unlike standard texture models built from pixel intensities or responses generated by generic filters (e.g. Gabor), our framework has two important advantages. Firstly, by virtue of discriminative training, invariance to external variations (like identity, pose, illumination and expression) is achieved. Secondly, we show that the responses generated by discriminatively trained filters (or patch-experts) are sparse and can be modeled using a very small number of parameters. As a result, the optimization methods based on the proposed texture model can better cope with unseen variations. We illustrate this point by formulating both part-based and holistic approaches for generic face alignment and show that our framework outperforms the state-of-the-art on multiple ”wild” databases. The code and dataset annotations are available for research purposes from http://ibug.doc.ic.ac.uk/resources