# Separable Batch Normalization for Robust Facial Landmark Localization with Cross-protocol Network Training

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.06663 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06663/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jan 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [Group Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08494/) (2018)
- [Instance Normalization: The Missing Ingredient for Fast Stylization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08022/) (2016)
- [Stacked Hourglass Networks for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06937/) (2016)
- [Joint Face Detection and Alignment using Multi-task Cascaded Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02878/) (2016)
- [SphereFace: Deep Hypersphere Embedding for Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.08063/) (2017)
- [Dynamic Convolution: Attention over Convolution Kernels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03458/) (2019)
- [WIDER FACE: A Face Detection Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06523/) (2015)
- [Towards Fast, Accurate and Stable 3D Dense Face Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09960/) (2020)
- [Domain-Specific Batch Normalization for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03950/) (2019)
- [Face Alignment in Full Pose Range: A 3D Total Solution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.01005/) (2018)
- [Look at Boundary: A Boundary-Aware Face Alignment Algorithm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10483/) (2018)
- [Batch Renormalization: Towards Reducing Minibatch Dependence in Batch-Normalized Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.03275/) (2017)
- [Adaptive Wing Loss for Robust Face Alignment via Heatmap Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07399/) (2019)
- [Wing Loss for Robust Facial Landmark Localisation with Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06753/) (2017)
- [LUVLi Face Alignment: Estimating Landmarks' Location, Uncertainty, and Visibility Likelihood](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02980/) (2020)
- [Style Aggregated Network for Facial Landmark Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.04108/) (2018)
- [Human Pose Regression by Combining Indirect Part Detection and Contextual Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.02322/) (2017)
- [Supervision-by-Registration: An Unsupervised Approach to Improve the Precision of Facial Landmark Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00966/) (2018)
- [3FabRec: Fast Few-shot Face alignment by Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10448/) (2019)
- [Instance Enhancement Batch Normalization: an Adaptive Regulator of Batch Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04008/) (2019)
- [Dynamic Attention-controlled Cascaded Shape Regression Exploiting Training Data Augmentation and Fuzzy-set Sample Weighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05396/) (2016)
- [Cross-Iteration Batch Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05712/) (2020)
- [Semantic Alignment: Finding Semantically Consistent Ground-truth for Facial Landmark Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10661/) (2019)
- [SSN: Learning Sparse Switchable Normalization via SparsestMax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03793/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Multi-Domain Multi-Definition Landmark Localization for Small Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10358/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

A big, diverse and balanced training data is the key to the success of deep neural network training. However, existing publicly available datasets used in facial landmark localization are usually much smaller than those for other computer vision tasks. A small dataset without diverse and balanced training samples cannot support the training of a deep network effectively. To address the above issues, this paper presents a novel Separable Batch Normalization (SepBN) module with a Cross-protocol Network Training (CNT) strategy for robust facial landmark localization. Different from the standard BN layer that uses all the training data to calculate a single set of parameters, SepBN considers that the samples of a training dataset may belong to different sub-domains. Accordingly, the proposed SepBN module uses multiple sets of parameters, each corresponding to a specific sub-domain. However, the selection of an appropriate branch in the inference stage remains a challenging task because the sub-domain of a test sample is unknown. To mitigate this difficulty, we propose a novel attention mechanism that assigns different weights to each branch for automatic selection in an effective style. As a further innovation, the proposed CNT strategy trains a network using multiple datasets having different facial landmark annotation systems, boosting the performance and enhancing the generalization capacity of the trained network. The experimental results obtained on several well-known datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.