Fast Facial Landmark Detection and Applications: A Survey

Abstract

Dense facial landmark detection is a key element of face processing pipeline. In this paper we survey and analyze modern neural-network-based facial landmark detection algorithms, focus on approaches that have led to a significant increase in quality over the past few years on datasets with large pose and emotion variability, significant face occlusion, all of which are typical in real-world scenarios. We summarize the improvements into categories, provide quality comparison on difficult and modern in-the-wild datasets: 300 Faces in-the-wild (300W), Annotated Facial Landmarks in-the-wild (AFLW), Wider Facial Landmarks in-the-wild (WFLW), Caltech Occluded Faces in-the-wild (COFW). Additionally, we compare algorithm speed on desktop central and graphical processors, mobile devices. For completeness, we also briefly touch on established methods with open implementations available. Besides, we cover applications and vulnerabilities of the landmark detection algorithms. We hope that generalizations that we make will lead to further algorithm improvements.

Keywords

• computer vision
• edge computing
• facial landmarks
• neural networks
• mobile applications
• literature overview