Face alignment via boosted ranking model

Face alignment seeks to deform a face model to match it with the features of the image of a face by optimizing an appropriate cost function. We propose a new face model that is aligned by maximizing a score function, which we learn from training data, and that we impose to be concave. We show that this problem can be reduced to learning a classifier that is able to say whether or not by switching from one alignment to a new one, the model is approaching the correct fitting. This relates to the ranking problem where a number of instances need to be ordered. For training the model, we propose to extend Gentle Boost [23] to rank-learning. Extensive experimentation shows the superiority of this approach to other learning paradigms, and demonstrates that this model exceeds the alignment performance of the state-of-the-art.