Facial Contour Labeling via Congealing

Abstract

It is a challenging vision problem to discover non-rigid shape deformation for an image ensemble belonging to a single object class, in an automatic or semi-supervised fashion. The conventional semi- supervised approach [1] uses a congealing-like process to propagate manual landmark labels from a few images to a large ensemble. Although effective on an inter-person database with a large population, there is potential for increased labeling accuracy. With the goal of providing highly accurate labels, in this paper we present a parametric curve representation for each of the seven major facial contours. The appearance information along the curve, named curve descriptor , is extracted and used for congealing. Furthermore, we demonstrate that advanced features such as Histogram of Oriented Gradient (HOG) can be utilized in the proposed congealing framework, which operates in a dual-curve congealing manner for the case of a closed contour. With extensive experiments on a 300-image ensemble that exhibits moderate variation in facial pose and shape, we show that substantial progress has been achieved in the labeling accuracy compared to the previous state-of-the-art approach.