In-plane face orientation estimation in still images

Taner Danisman (1, 2) , Ioan Marius Bilasco (2, 3)

1 Akdeniz University
2 LIFL - FOX MIIRE
3 Université de Lille, Sciences et Technologies

This paper addresses a fine in-plane (roll) face orientation estimation for a perspective face analysis algorithm that requires normalized frontal faces. As most of the face analysers (e.g., gender, expression, and recognition) need frontal up-right faces, there is a clear need for the precise roll estimation, as precise face normalization has an important role in classification methods. The in-plane orientation estimation algorithm is constructed on top of regular Viola-Jones frontal face detector. When a face is detected for the first time, it is rotated with respect to the face origin to find the boundaries of the detection. Mean value of these angles is said to be the measurement of the in-plane rotation of the face. Since we only need a face detection algorithm, the proposed method can work effectively on very small sized faces where traditional landmark (eye, mouth) or planar detection based estimations fail. Experiments on controlled and unconstrained large-scale datasets (CMU Rotated, YouTube, Boston University Face Tracking, Caltech, FG-NET Aging, BioID and Manchester Talking-Face) showed that the proposed method is robust to various settings for in-plane face orientation estimation in terms of RMSE and MAE. We achieved less than ±3.5 ∘ mean absolute error for roll estimation which proves that the accuracy of the proposed method is comparable to that of the state-of-the-art tracking based approaches for the roll estimation.

Domaines: Vision par ordinateur et reconnaissance de formes [cs.CV]

Taner Danisman, Ioan Marius Bilasco. In-plane face orientation estimation in still images. Multimedia Tools and Applications, 2016, 75 (13), pp.7799-7829. ⟨10.1007/s11042-015-2699-x⟩. ⟨hal-01169835⟩