Papers › Convolutional aggregation of local evidence for large pose face alignment

Convolutional aggregation of local evidence for large pose face alignment

21 Sep 2016British Machine Vision Conference 2016 9archive 2025-07-28

Adrian Bulat, Georgios Tzimiropoulos

Methods for unconstrained face alignment must satisfy two requirements: they must not rely on accurate initialisation/face detection and they should perform equally well for the whole spectrum of facial poses. To the best of our knowledge, there are no methods meeting these requirements to satisfactory extent, and in this paper, we propose Convolutional Aggregation of Local Evidence (CALE), a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture particularly designed for addressing both of them. In particular, to remove the requirement for accurate face detection, our system firstly performs facial part detection, providing confidence scores for the location of each of the facial landmarks (local evidence). Next, these score maps along with early CNN features are aggregated by our system through joint regression in order to refine the landmarks’ location. Besides playing the role of a graphical model, CNN regression is a key feature of our system, guiding the network to rely on context for predicting the location of occluded landmarks, typically encountered in very large poses. The whole system is trained end-to-end with intermediate supervision. When applied to AFLW-PIFA, the most challenging human face alignment test set to date, our method provides more than 50% gain in localisation accuracy when compared to other recently published methods for large pose face alignment. Going beyond human faces, we also demonstrate that CALE is effective in dealing with very large changes in shape and appearance, typically encountered in animal faces.

PaperPDF

Code

No code repository is listed for this paper in the archive or in Syntology's graph.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Face AlignmentFace Detectionregression

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Face Alignment AFLW-PIFA (21 points) Face alignment NME 2.63% #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment AFLW-PIFA (34 points) Face alignment NME 2.96% #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections