Towards stabilizing facial landmark detection and tracking via hierarchical filtering: A new method

Many facial landmark detection and tracking methods suffer from instability problems that have a negative influence on real-world applications, such as facial animation, head pose estimation and real-time facial 3D reconstruction. The instability results of landmark tracking cause face pose shaking and face movement that is not fluent enough. However, most of the existing landmark detection and tracking methods only consider the stability of face location but neglect the stability of local landmark movement. To solve the problem of landmark local shaking, we present a novel hierarchical filtering method for stabilized facial landmark detection and tracking in video frames. The proposed method addresses the challenging landmark local shaking problem and provides effective remedies to solve them. The main contribution within our solution is a novel hierarchical filtering strategy, which guarantees the robustness of global whole facial shape tracking and the adaptivity of local facial parts tracking. The proposed solution does not depend on specific face detection and alignment algorithms, and thus, can be easily deployed into existing systems. Extensive experimental evaluations and analyses on benchmark datasets and 3D head pose datasets verify the effectiveness of our proposed stabilizing method. (c) 2020 The Franklin Institute. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.