# Robust Face Alignment by Multi-order High-precision Hourglass Network

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.08722 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08722/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 17 Oct 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Sparse Local Patch Transformer for Robust Face Alignment and Landmarks Inherent Relation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06541/) (2022)
- [Recurrence without Recurrence: Stable Video Landmark Detection with Deep Equilibrium Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00600/) (2023)
- [Learning Motion-Robust Remote Photoplethysmography through Arbitrary Resolution Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16922/) (2022)
- [Precise Facial Landmark Detection by Reference Heatmap Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07840/) (2023)
- [HIH: Towards More Accurate Face Alignment via Heatmap in Heatmap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03100/) (2021)
- [Subpixel Heatmap Regression for Facial Landmark Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02360/) (2021)
- [Robust and Precise Facial Landmark Detection by Self-Calibrated Pose Attention Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12328/) (2021)
- [Precise Facial Landmark Detection by Dynamic Semantic Aggregation Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00740/) (2024)
- [Proto-Former: Unified Facial Landmark Detection by Prototype Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15338/) (2025)
- [JDSR-GAN: Constructing An Efficient Joint Learning Network for Masked Face Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13676/) (2021)
- [Mitigating Knowledge Discrepancies among Multiple Datasets for Task-agnostic Unified Face Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22359/) (2025)
- [Heatmap Regression without Soft-Argmax for Facial Landmark Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14929/) (2025)
- [Supervision-by-Hallucination-and-Transfer: A Weakly-Supervised Approach for Robust and Precise Facial Landmark Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12919/) (2026)
- [FreqFLD: Towards All-in-One Facial Landmark Detection via Frequency Modulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.10278/) (2026)
- [Dual-Stream Collaborative Transformer for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12926/) (2026)
- [FAHCD-Net: Frequency-Adaptive Heatmap-Conditional Diffusion Networks for Robust Facial Landmark Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.16842/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Heatmap regression (HR) has become one of the mainstream approaches for face alignment and has obtained promising results under constrained environments. However, when a face image suffers from large pose variations, heavy occlusions and complicated illuminations, the performances of HR methods degrade greatly due to the low resolutions of the generated landmark heatmaps and the exclusion of important high-order information that can be used to learn more discriminative features. To address the alignment problem for faces with extremely large poses and heavy occlusions, this paper proposes a heatmap subpixel regression (HSR) method and a multi-order cross geometry-aware (MCG) model, which are seamlessly integrated into a novel multi-order high-precision hourglass network (MHHN). The HSR method is proposed to achieve high-precision landmark detection by a well-designed subpixel detection loss (SDL) and subpixel detection technology (SDT). At the same time, the MCG model is able to use the proposed multi-order cross information to learn more discriminative representations for enhancing facial geometric constraints and context information. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to explore heatmap subpixel regression for robust and high-precision face alignment. The experimental results from challenging benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in the literature.