Papers › LUVLi Face Alignment: Estimating Landmarks' Location, Uncertainty, and Visibility Likelihood

LUVLi Face Alignment: Estimating Landmarks' Location, Uncertainty, and Visibility Likelihood

6 Apr 2020CVPR 2020 6arXiv:2004.02980archive 2025-07-28

Abhinav Kumar, Tim K. Marks, Wenxuan Mou, Ye Wang, Michael Jones, Anoop Cherian, Toshiaki Koike-Akino, Xiaoming Liu, Chen Feng

Modern face alignment methods have become quite accurate at predicting the locations of facial landmarks, but they do not typically estimate the uncertainty of their predicted locations nor predict whether landmarks are visible. In this paper, we present a novel framework for jointly predicting landmark locations, associated uncertainties of these predicted locations, and landmark visibilities. We model these as mixed random variables and estimate them using a deep network trained with our proposed Location, Uncertainty, and Visibility Likelihood (LUVLi) loss. In addition, we release an entirely new labeling of a large face alignment dataset with over 19,000 face images in a full range of head poses. Each face is manually labeled with the ground-truth locations of 68 landmarks, with the additional information of whether each landmark is unoccluded, self-occluded (due to extreme head poses), or externally occluded. Not only does our joint estimation yield accurate estimates of the uncertainty of predicted landmark locations, but it also yields state-of-the-art estimates for the landmark locations themselves on multiple standard face alignment datasets. Our method's estimates of the uncertainty of predicted landmark locations could be used to automatically identify input images on which face alignment fails, which can be critical for downstream tasks.

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Tasks

Face AlignmentFacial Landmark Detection

Datasets

Introduced by this paper, per the archive.

MERL-RAV

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Face Alignment 300W (Common) LUVLi NME 2.76 #2 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment 300W Split 2 LUVLi AUC@7 (box) 68.3 #3 of 7 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment 300W Split 2 LUVLi NME (box) 2.24 #3 of 7 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment 300W Split 2 (300W-LP) LUVLI AUC@7 (bbox) 70.2 #2 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment 300W Split 2 (300W-LP) LUVLI NME (bbox) 2.10 #2 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment AFLW-19 LUVLi AUC_box@0.07 (%, Full) 68.0 #8 of 23 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment AFLW-19 LUVLi NME_box (%, Full) 2.28 #8 of 23 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment AFLW-19 LUVLi NME_diag (%, Frontal) 1.19 #8 of 23 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment AFLW-19 LUVLi NME_diag (%, Full) 1.39 #8 of 23 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment COFW-68 LUVLi AUC@7 (box) 60.8 #7 of 7 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment COFW-68 LUVLi NME (box) 2.75 #7 of 7 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment COFW-68 (300WLP) LUVLI AUC@7 63.4 #2 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment COFW-68 (300WLP) LUVLI NME (box) 2.57 #2 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment MERL-RAV LUVLi AUC@7 (box) 77.08 #2 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment MERL-RAV LUVLi NME (box) 1.61 #2 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment Menpo LUVLi AUC (box) 71.9 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment Menpo LUVLi NME (box) 2.04 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment WFLW LUVLi AUC@10 (inter-ocular) 57.7 #17 of 36 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment WFLW LUVLi FR@10 (inter-ocular) 3.12 #17 of 36 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment WFLW LUVLi NME (inter-ocular) 4.37 #17 of 36 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment WFW (Extra Data) LUVLi AUC@10 (inter-ocular) 57.7 #9 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment WFW (Extra Data) LUVLi FR@10 (inter-ocular) 3.12 #9 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment WFW (Extra Data) LUVLi NME (inter-ocular) 4.37 #9 of 11 Archive leaderboard report

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