Multi-view facial landmark detector learned by the Structured Output SVM

• Real-time multi-view landmark detector independent on initialization
• Detector composed of a mixture of tree based Deformable Part Models
• Landmark detector learned by the Structured Output Support Vector Machines
• Coarse-to-fine strategy to speed up inference based on dynamic programming

We propose a real-time multi-view landmark detector based on Deformable Part Models (DPM). The detector is composed of a mixture of tree based DPMs, each component describing landmark configurations in a specific range of viewing angles. The usage of view specific DPMs allows to capture a large range of poses and to deal with the problem of self-occlusions. Parameters of the detector are learned from annotated examples by the Structured Output Support Vector Machines algorithm. The learning objective is directly related to the performance measure used for detector evaluation. The tree based DPM allows to find a globally optimal landmark configuration by the dynamic programming. We propose a coarse-to-fine search strategy which allows real-time processing by the dynamic programming also on high resolution images. Empirical evaluation on “in the wild” images shows that the proposed detector is competitive with the state-of-the-art methods in terms of speed and accuracy yet it keeps the guarantee of finding a globally optimal estimate in contrast to other methods.