Robust and Precise Facial Landmark Detection by Self-Calibrated Pose Attention Network

Current fully supervised facial landmark detection methods have progressed rapidly and achieved remarkable performance. However, they still suffer when coping with faces under large poses and heavy occlusions for inaccurate facial shape constraints and insufficient labeled training samples. In this article, we propose a semisupervised framework, that is, a self-calibrated pose attention network (SCPAN) to achieve more robust and precise facial landmark detection in challenging scenarios. To be specific, a boundary-aware landmark intensity (BALI) field is proposed to model more effective facial shape constraints by fusing boundary and landmark intensity field information. Moreover, a self-calibrated pose attention (SCPA) model is designed to provide a self-learned objective function that enforces intermediate supervision without label information by introducing a self-calibrated mechanism and a pose attention mask. We show that by integrating the BALI fields and SCPA model into a novel SCPAN, more facial prior knowledge can be learned and the detection accuracy and robustness of our method for faces with large poses and heavy occlusions have been improved. The experimental results obtained for challenging benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in the literature.