Context modeling for facial landmark detection based on Non-Adjacent Rectangle (NAR) Haar-like feature

Automatically locating facial landmarks in images is an important task in computer vision. This paper proposes a novel context modeling method for facial landmark detection, which integrates context constraints together with local texture model in the cascaded AdaBoost framework. The motivation of our method lies in the basic human psychology observation that not only the local texture information but also the global context information is used for human to locate facial landmarks in faces. Therefore, in our solution, a novel type of feature, called Non-Adjacent Rectangle (NAR) Haar-like feature, is proposed to characterize the co-occurrence between facial landmarks and its surroundings, i.e., the context information, in terms of low-level features. For the locating task, traditional Haar-like features (characterizing local texture information) and NAR Haar-like features (characterizing context constraints in global sense) are combined together to form more powerful representations. Through Real AdaBoost learning, the most discriminative feature set is selected automatically and used for facial landmark detection. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, we evaluate our facial landmark detection algorithm on BioID and Cohn-Kanade face databases. Experimental results convincingly show that the NAR Haar-like feature is effective to model the context and our proposed algorithm impressively outperforms the published state-of-the-art methods. In addition, the generalization capability of the NAR Haar-like feature is further validated by extended applications to face detection task on FDDB face database.

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► We evaluate the importance of context for face and facial landmark detection.
► Non-Adjacent Rectangle Haar-like feature is proposed to model context.
► The proposed feature is complementary to traditional local texture features.
► We select the most discriminative features automatically by Real AdaBoost learning.
► Experiments on face and facial landmark detection show promising performance.