Papers › Look at Boundary: A Boundary-Aware Face Alignment Algorithm

Look at Boundary: A Boundary-Aware Face Alignment Algorithm

26 May 2018CVPR 2018 6arXiv:1805.10483archive 2025-07-28

Wayne Wu, Chen Qian, Shuo Yang, Quan Wang, Yici Cai, Qiang Zhou

We present a novel boundary-aware face alignment algorithm by utilising boundary lines as the geometric structure of a human face to help facial landmark localisation. Unlike the conventional heatmap based method and regression based method, our approach derives face landmarks from boundary lines which remove the ambiguities in the landmark definition. Three questions are explored and answered by this work: 1. Why using boundary? 2. How to use boundary? 3. What is the relationship between boundary estimation and landmarks localisation? Our boundary- aware face alignment algorithm achieves 3.49% mean error on 300-W Fullset, which outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. Our method can also easily integrate information from other datasets. By utilising boundary information of 300-W dataset, our method achieves 3.92% mean error with 0.39% failure rate on COFW dataset, and 1.25% mean error on AFLW-Full dataset. Moreover, we propose a new dataset WFLW to unify training and testing across different factors, including poses, expressions, illuminations, makeups, occlusions, and blurriness. Dataset and model will be publicly available at https://wywu.github.io/projects/LAB/LAB.html

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Code

wywu/LAB officialNOASSERTION report
open-mmlab/mmpose pytorchApache-2.0 report

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Tasks

Face AlignmentFacial Landmark Detection

Datasets

Introduced by this paper, per the archive.

WFLW

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Face Alignment 300W LAB NME_inter-ocular (%, Challenge) 5.19 #29 of 48 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment 300W LAB NME_inter-ocular (%, Common) 2.98 #29 of 48 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment 300W LAB NME_inter-ocular (%, Full) 3.49 #29 of 48 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment 300W LAB NME_inter-pupil (%, Challenge) 6.98 #29 of 48 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment 300W LAB NME_inter-pupil (%, Common) 3.42 #29 of 48 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment 300W LAB NME_inter-pupil (%, Full) 4.12 #29 of 48 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment AFLW-19 LAB (w/ B) NME_diag (%, Frontal) 1.14 #4 of 23 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment AFLW-19 LAB (w/ B) NME_diag (%, Full) 1.25 #4 of 23 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment AFLW-19 LAB (w/o B) NME_diag (%, Frontal) 1.62 #15 of 23 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment AFLW-19 LAB (w/o B) NME_diag (%, Full) 1.85 #15 of 23 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment COFW LAB (w/ B) NME (inter-ocular) 3.92% #18 of 28 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment COFW LAB NME (inter-ocular) 5.58% #21 of 28 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment WFLW LAB AUC@10 (inter-ocular) 53.2 #29 of 36 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment WFLW LAB FR@10 (inter-ocular) 7.56 #29 of 36 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment WFLW LAB NME (inter-ocular) 5.27 #29 of 36 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

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