Attentive One-Dimensional Heatmap Regression for Facial Landmark Detection and Tracking

Although heatmap regression is considered a state-of-the-art method to locate facial landmarks, it suffers from huge spatial complexity and is prone to quantization error. To address this, we propose a novel attentive one-dimensional heatmap regression method for facial landmark localization. First, we predict two groups of 1D heatmaps to represent the marginal distributions of the x and y coordinates. These 1D heatmaps reduce spatial complexity significantly compared to current heatmap regression methods, which use 2D heatmaps to represent the joint distributions of x and y coordinates. With much lower spatial complexity, the proposed method can output high-resolution 1D heatmaps despite limited GPU memory, significantly alleviating the quantization error. Second, a co-attention mechanism is adopted to model the inherent spatial patterns existing in x and y coordinates, and therefore the joint distributions on the x and y axes are also captured. Third, based on the 1D heatmap structures, we propose a facial landmark detector capturing spatial patterns for landmark detection on an image; and a tracker further capturing temporal patterns with a temporal refinement mechanism for landmark tracking. Experimental results on four benchmark databases demonstrate the superiority of our method.