Abstract
A large amount of training data is usually crucial for successful supervised learning. However, the task of providing training samples is often time-consuming, involving a considerable amount of tedious manual work. Also the amount of training data available is often limited. As an alternative, in this paper, we discuss how best to augment the available data for the application of automatic facial landmark detection (FLD). We propose the use of a 3D morphable face model to generate synthesised faces for a regression-based detector training. Benefiting from the large synthetic training data, the learned detector is shown to exhibit a better capability to detect the landmarks of a face with pose variations. Furthermore, the synthesised training dataset provides accurate and consistent landmarks as compared to using manual landmarks, especially for occluded facial parts. The synthetic data and real data are from different domains; hence the detector trained using only synthesised faces does not generalise well to real faces. To deal with this problem, we propose a cascaded collaborative regression (CCR) algorithm, which generates a cascaded shape updater that has the ability to overcome the difficulties caused by pose variations, as well as achieving better accuracy when applied to real faces. The training is based on a mix of synthetic and real image data with the mixing controlled by a dynamic mixture weighting schedule. Initially the training uses heavily the synthetic data, as this can model the gross variations between the various poses. As the training proceeds, progressively more of the natural images are incorporated, as these can model finer detail. To improve the performance of the proposed algorithm further, we designed a dynamic multi-scale local feature extraction method, which captures more informative local features for detector training. An extensive evaluation on both controlled and uncontrolled face datasets demonstrates the merit of the proposed algorithm.