Automatic landmark point detection and tracking for human facial expressions

Facial landmarks are a set of salient points, usually located on the corners, tips or mid points of the facial components. Reliable facial landmarks and their associated detection and tracking algorithms can be widely used for representing the important visual features for face registration and expression recognition. In this paper we propose an efficient and robust method for facial landmark detection and tracking from video sequences. We select 26 landmark points on the facial region to facilitate the analysis of human facial expressions. They are detected in the first input frame by the scale invariant feature based detectors. Multiple Differential Evolution-Markov Chain (DE-MC) particle filters are applied for tracking these points through the video sequences. A kernel correlation analysis approach is proposed to find the detection likelihood by maximizing a similarity criterion between the target points and the candidate points. The detection likelihood is then integrated into the tracker’s observation likelihood. Sampling efficiency is improved and minimal amount of computation is achieved by using the intermediate results obtained in particle allocations. Three public databases are used for experiments and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.