Papers › Wing Loss for Robust Facial Landmark Localisation with Convolutional Neural Networks

Wing Loss for Robust Facial Landmark Localisation with Convolutional Neural Networks

17 Nov 2017CVPR 2018 6arXiv:1711.06753archive 2025-07-28

Zhen-Hua Feng, Josef Kittler, Muhammad Awais, Patrik Huber, Xiao-Jun Wu

We present a new loss function, namely Wing loss, for robust facial landmark localisation with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). We first compare and analyse different loss functions including L2, L1 and smooth L1. The analysis of these loss functions suggests that, for the training of a CNN-based localisation model, more attention should be paid to small and medium range errors. To this end, we design a piece-wise loss function. The new loss amplifies the impact of errors from the interval (-w, w) by switching from L1 loss to a modified logarithm function. To address the problem of under-representation of samples with large out-of-plane head rotations in the training set, we propose a simple but effective boosting strategy, referred to as pose-based data balancing. In particular, we deal with the data imbalance problem by duplicating the minority training samples and perturbing them by injecting random image rotation, bounding box translation and other data augmentation approaches. Last, the proposed approach is extended to create a two-stage framework for robust facial landmark localisation. The experimental results obtained on AFLW and 300W demonstrate the merits of the Wing loss function, and prove the superiority of the proposed method over the state-of-the-art approaches.

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Code

mikgur/MADE_CV_1000_facial_landmarks mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
mktoid/made-thousand-facial-landmarks mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
xialuxi/arcface-caffe mentioned on GitHub report
open-mmlab/mmpose pytorchApache-2.0 report

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Tasks

Data AugmentationFace Alignment

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Face Alignment 300W Wing NME_inter-pupil (%, Challenge) 7.18 #47 of 48 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment 300W Wing NME_inter-pupil (%, Common) 3.27 #47 of 48 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment 300W Wing NME_inter-pupil (%, Full) 4.04 #47 of 48 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment AFLW-19 Wing AUC_box@0.07 (%, Full) 53.5 #14 of 23 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment AFLW-19 Wing NME_box (%, Full) 3.56 #14 of 23 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment AFLW-19 Wing NME_diag (%, Full) 1.65 #14 of 23 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment COFW Wing (Feng et al., 2018) NME (inter-ocular) 5.07 #20 of 28 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment WFLW Wing AUC@10 (inter-ocular) 55.4 #27 of 36 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment WFLW Wing FR@10 (inter-ocular) 6.00 #27 of 36 Archive leaderboard report
Face Alignment WFLW Wing NME (inter-ocular) 5.11 #27 of 36 Archive leaderboard report

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