Laplace Landmark Localization

Landmark localization in images and videos is a classic problem solved in various ways. Nowadays, with deep networks prevailing throughout machine learning, there are revamped interests in pushing facial landmark detectors to handle more challenging data. Most efforts use network objectives based on L-1 or L-2 norms, which have several disadvantages. First of all, the generated heatmaps translate to the locations of landmarks (i.e. confidence maps) from which predicted landmark locations (i.e. the means) get penalized without accounting for the spread: a high-scatter corresponds to low confidence and vice-versa. For this, we introduce a LaplaceKL objective that penalizes for low confidence. Another issue is a dependency on labeled data, which are expensive to obtain and susceptible to error. To address both issues, we propose an adversarial training framework that leverages unlabeled data to improve model performance. Our method claims state-of-the-art on all of the 300W benchmarks and ranks second-to-best on the Annotated Facial Landmarks in the Wild (AFLW) dataset. Furthermore, our model is robust with a reduced size: 1/8 the number of channels (i.e. 0.0398 MB) is comparable to the state-of-the-art in real-time on CPU. Thus, this work is of high practical value to real-life application.