Papers › Face Alignment Across Large Poses: A 3D Solution

Face Alignment Across Large Poses: A 3D Solution

23 Nov 2015CVPR 2016 6arXiv:1511.07212archive 2025-07-28

Xiangyu Zhu, Zhen Lei, Xiaoming Liu, Hailin Shi, Stan Z. Li

Face alignment, which fits a face model to an image and extracts the semantic meanings of facial pixels, has been an important topic in CV community. However, most algorithms are designed for faces in small to medium poses (below 45 degree), lacking the ability to align faces in large poses up to 90 degree. The challenges are three-fold: Firstly, the commonly used landmark-based face model assumes that all the landmarks are visible and is therefore not suitable for profile views. Secondly, the face appearance varies more dramatically across large poses, ranging from frontal view to profile view. Thirdly, labelling landmarks in large poses is extremely challenging since the invisible landmarks have to be guessed. In this paper, we propose a solution to the three problems in an new alignment framework, called 3D Dense Face Alignment (3DDFA), in which a dense 3D face model is fitted to the image via convolutional neutral network (CNN). We also propose a method to synthesize large-scale training samples in profile views to solve the third problem of data labelling. Experiments on the challenging AFLW database show that our approach achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods.

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Tasks

3D Face ReconstructionFace AlignmentFace ModelHead Pose Estimation

Datasets

Introduced by this paper, per the archive.

AFLW2000-3D

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
3D Face Reconstruction AFLW2000-3D 3DDFA Mean NME 5.3695% #6 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
3D Face Reconstruction Florence 3DDFA Mean NME 6.3833% #3 of 16 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment AFLW2000 3DDFA Error rate 5.42 #4 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment AFLW2000-3D 3DDFA + SDM Balanced NME (2D Sparse Alignment) 4.94% #13 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Facial Landmark Detection 300W CFSS NME 5.76 #12 of 15 Archive leaderboard report
Facial Landmark Detection 300W 3DDFA NME 7.01 #14 of 15 Archive leaderboard report
Head Pose Estimation AFLW2000 3DDFA MAE 7.393 #23 of 25 Archive leaderboard report
Head Pose Estimation BIWI 3DDFA MAE (trained with other data) 19.068 #21 of 29 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.

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