Papers › Unsupervised learning of object landmarks by factorized spatial embeddings

Unsupervised learning of object landmarks by factorized spatial embeddings

5 May 2017ICCV 2017 10arXiv:1705.02193archive 2025-07-28

James Thewlis, Hakan Bilen, Andrea Vedaldi

Learning automatically the structure of object categories remains an important open problem in computer vision. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised approach that can discover and learn landmarks in object categories, thus characterizing their structure. Our approach is based on factorizing image deformations, as induced by a viewpoint change or an object deformation, by learning a deep neural network that detects landmarks consistently with such visual effects. Furthermore, we show that the learned landmarks establish meaningful correspondences between different object instances in a category without having to impose this requirement explicitly. We assess the method qualitatively on a variety of object types, natural and man-made. We also show that our unsupervised landmarks are highly predictive of manually-annotated landmarks in face benchmark datasets, and can be used to regress these with a high degree of accuracy.

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ObjectUnsupervised Facial Landmark DetectionUnsupervised Human Pose Estimation

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Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Unsupervised Facial Landmark Detection 300W FSE NME 7.97 #3 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Unsupervised Facial Landmark Detection AFLW-MTFL FSE NME 10.53 #2 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Unsupervised Facial Landmark Detection MAFL Thewlis2017unsupervised NME 6.32 #11 of 13 Archive leaderboard report
Unsupervised Facial Landmark Detection MAFL FSE NME 6.67 #12 of 13 Archive leaderboard report
Unsupervised Facial Landmark Detection MAFL Unaligned ULD NME 31.3 #8 of 9 Archive leaderboard report

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