Papers › Pixel-in-Pixel Net: Towards Efficient Facial Landmark Detection in the Wild

Pixel-in-Pixel Net: Towards Efficient Facial Landmark Detection in the Wild

8 Mar 2020arXiv:2003.03771archive 2025-07-28

Haibo Jin, Shengcai Liao, Ling Shao

Recently, heatmap regression models have become popular due to their superior performance in locating facial landmarks. However, three major problems still exist among these models: (1) they are computationally expensive; (2) they usually lack explicit constraints on global shapes; (3) domain gaps are commonly present. To address these problems, we propose Pixel-in-Pixel Net (PIPNet) for facial landmark detection. The proposed model is equipped with a novel detection head based on heatmap regression, which conducts score and offset predictions simultaneously on low-resolution feature maps. By doing so, repeated upsampling layers are no longer necessary, enabling the inference time to be largely reduced without sacrificing model accuracy. Besides, a simple but effective neighbor regression module is proposed to enforce local constraints by fusing predictions from neighboring landmarks, which enhances the robustness of the new detection head. To further improve the cross-domain generalization capability of PIPNet, we propose self-training with curriculum. This training strategy is able to mine more reliable pseudo-labels from unlabeled data across domains by starting with an easier task, then gradually increasing the difficulty to provide more precise labels. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of PIPNet, which obtains state-of-the-art results on three out of six popular benchmarks under the supervised setting. The results on two cross-domain test sets are also consistently improved compared to the baselines. Notably, our lightweight version of PIPNet runs at 35.7 FPS and 200 FPS on CPU and GPU, respectively, while still maintaining a competitive accuracy to state-of-the-art methods. The code of PIPNet is available at https://github.com/jhb86253817/PIPNet.

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jhb86253817/PIPNet officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report
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conv_1x1_bn jhb86253817/PIPNet/lib/mobilenetv3.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong MIT (permissive) · 4e90491a30c2dc28 · report
conv_3x3_bn jhb86253817/PIPNet/lib/mobilenetv3.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong MIT (permissive) · 5221887077e3fb54 · report
compute_loss_pip jhb86253817/PIPNet/lib/functions.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 180321558d57e253 · report
compute_loss_pip jhb86253817/PIPNet/lib/functions_gssl.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 0ecee63670b4125b · report
get_label jhb86253817/PIPNet/lib/functions.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · c6f9712584e0d9f8 · report
get_meanface jhb86253817/PIPNet/lib/functions.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · d4eeabbb4d3bfbcb · report
process_300w jhb86253817/PIPNet/lib/preprocess.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 22d83c9db600623b · report
process_300w jhb86253817/PIPNet/lib/preprocess_gssl.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 5a75fb8671b68880 · report
process_celeba jhb86253817/PIPNet/lib/preprocess_gssl.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 657f44be85c2cb01 · report
process_cofw jhb86253817/PIPNet/lib/preprocess.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · ac5ae0ae9d4b74aa · report
process_wflw jhb86253817/PIPNet/lib/preprocess.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 260fe0df73217f72 · report
process_wflw jhb86253817/PIPNet/lib/preprocess_gssl.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 149fe226ec8dbea0 · report
random_blur jhb86253817/PIPNet/lib/data_utils.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 4e4f39068434b6e0 · report
random_occlusion jhb86253817/PIPNet/lib/data_utils.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 47e71b4e99e8b661 · report
random_translate jhb86253817/PIPNet/lib/data_utils.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 555d941276e9070f · report
fr_and_auc deftruth/torchlm/torchlm/metrics/metrics.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 7a33e0cbdc0a9b10 · report
nme deftruth/torchlm/torchlm/metrics/metrics.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 791cd5847cdd6ff5 · report

Tasks

Domain GeneralizationFace AlignmentFacial Landmark Detectionregression

2 archive task tags without a task page not shown.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Face Alignment 300W PIPNet (ResNet-101) NME_inter-ocular (%, Challenge) 4.89 #18 of 48 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment 300W PIPNet (ResNet-101) NME_inter-ocular (%, Common) 2.78 #18 of 48 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment 300W PIPNet (ResNet-101) NME_inter-ocular (%, Full) 3.19 #18 of 48 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment AFLW-19 PIPNet (ResNet-101) NME_diag (%, Full) 1.42 #9 of 23 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment COFW PIPNet (ResNet-101) NME (inter-ocular) 3.08% #4 of 28 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment WFLW PIPNet (ResNet-101) NME (inter-ocular) 4.31 #14 of 36 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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