mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Effective Face Frontalization in Unconstrained Images

arXiv 1411.7964 ↗First posted 28 Nov 2014cs.CVcited by 34

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Abstract (arXiv)

"Frontalization" is the process of synthesizing frontal facing views of faces appearing in single unconstrained photos. Recent reports have suggested that this process may substantially boost the performance of face recognition systems. This, by transforming the challenging problem of recognizing faces viewed from unconstrained viewpoints to the easier problem of recognizing faces in constrained, forward facing poses. Previous frontalization methods did this by attempting to approximate 3D facial shapes for each query image. We observe that 3D face shape estimation from unconstrained photos may be a harder problem than frontalization and can potentially introduce facial misalignments. Instead, we explore the simpler approach of using a single, unmodified, 3D surface as an approximation to the shape of all input faces. We show that this leads to a straightforward, efficient and easy to implement method for frontalization. More importantly, it produces aesthetic new frontal views and is surprisingly effective when used for face recognition and gender estimation.

Key facts. Cited by 34 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 28 Nov 2014.

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Citing papers per year: 2021: 10; 2022: 6; 2023: 9; 2024: 4; 2025: 4; 2026: 1.

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  1. 2022Realistic One-shot Mesh-based Head Avatarscited by 119
  2. 20223D face reconstruction with dense landmarkscited by 70
  3. 2021Mitigating Dataset Harms Requires Stewardship: Lessons from 1000 Paperscited by 49
  4. 2021Joint Face Image Restoration and Frontalization for Recognitioncited by 18
  5. 2022GAN-based Facial Attribute Manipulationcited by 16
  6. 2021Egocentric Videoconferencingcited by 10
  7. 20233D Face Reconstruction: the Road to Forensicscited by 7
  8. 2021Facial Landmark Points Detection Using Knowledge Distillation-Based Neural Networkscited by 6
  9. 2023DisCO: Portrait Distortion Correction with Perspective-Aware 3D GANscited by 6
  10. 2022Beyond 3DMM: Learning to Capture High-fidelity 3D Face Shapecited by 5
  11. 2024Cascaded Dual Vision Transformer for Accurate Facial Landmark Detectioncited by 5
  12. 2022Expression-preserving face frontalization improves visually assisted speech processingcited by 4
22 more
  1. 20233D Face Reconstruction for Forensic Recognition -- A Surveycited by 4
  2. 2025Exploiting Multiple Representations: 3D Face Biometrics Fusion with Application to Surveillancecited by 4
  3. 2021Weakly-Supervised Photo-realistic Texture Generation for 3D Face Reconstructioncited by 3
  4. 2021PAM: Pose Attention Module for Pose-Invariant Face Recognitioncited by 3
  5. 2022Pose Attention-Guided Profile-to-Frontal Face Recognitioncited by 3
  6. 2023A Study on the Impact of Face Image Quality on Face Recognition in the Wildcited by 3
  7. 20232D Image head pose estimation via latent space regression under occlusion settingscited by 3
  8. 2024Exploring 3D Face Reconstruction and Fusion Methods for Face Verification: A Case-Study in Video Surveillancecited by 3
  9. 2026FaceRefiner: High-Fidelity Facial Texture Refinement with Differentiable Rendering-based Style Transfercited by 3
  10. 2021An Efficient Multitask Neural Network for Face Alignment, Head Pose Estimation and Face Trackingcited by 2
  11. 2024Fiducial Focus Augmentation for Facial Landmark Detectioncited by 2
  12. 2021Learning to Deblur and Rotate Motion-Blurred Facescited by 1
  13. 20252D-3D Attention and Entropy for Pose Robust 2D Facial Recognitioncited by 1
  14. 2021Active Face Frontalization using Commodity Unmanned Aerial Vehiclescited by 0
  15. 2021Exploring Biases and Prejudice of Facial Synthesis via Semantic Latent Spacecited by 0
  16. 2023Generating Animatable 3D Cartoon Faces from Single Portraitscited by 0
  17. 2023Facial Landmark Detection Evaluation on MOBIO Databasecited by 0
  18. 2023Face Image Quality Enhancement Study for Face Recognitioncited by 0
  19. 2023Illumination and Shadows in Head Rotation: experiments with Denoising Diffusion Modelscited by 0
  20. 2024Direct May Not Be the Best: An Incremental Evolution View of Pose Generationcited by 0
  21. 2025Towards Large-Scale Pose-Invariant Face Recognition Using Face Defrontalizationcited by 0
  22. 2025Does Head Pose Correction Improve Biometric Facial Recognition?cited by 0