# FaceLift: Semi-supervised 3D Facial Landmark Localization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.19646 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19646/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09212/) (2019)
- [Efficient Geometry-aware 3D Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07945/) (2021)
- [OpenPose: Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08008/) (2018)
- [How far are we from solving the 2D & 3D Face Alignment problem? (and a dataset of 230,000 3D facial landmarks)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07332/) (2017)
- [One-Shot Free-View Neural Talking-Head Synthesis for Video Conferencing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.15126/) (2020)
- [A simple yet effective baseline for 3d human pose estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03098/) (2017)
- [3D Human Pose Estimation with Spatial and Temporal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10455/) (2021)
- [3D Morphable Face Models -- Past, Present and Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01815/) (2019)
- [CelebV-HQ: A Large-Scale Video Facial Attributes Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12393/) (2022)
- [Towards Fast, Accurate and Stable 3D Dense Face Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09960/) (2020)
- [Semantic Graph Convolutional Networks for 3D Human Pose Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03345/) (2019)
- [Fake It Till You Make It: Face analysis in the wild using synthetic data alone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.15102/) (2021)
- [Joint 3D Face Reconstruction and Dense Alignment with Position Map Regression Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07835/) (2018)
- [General Facial Representation Learning in a Visual-Linguistic Manner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03109/) (2021)
- [MHFormer: Multi-Hypothesis Transformer for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12707/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Ordinal Depth Supervision for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04095/) (2018)
- [PanoHead: Geometry-Aware 3D Full-Head Synthesis in 360circ](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13071/) (2023)
- [LUVLi Face Alignment: Estimating Landmarks' Location, Uncertainty, and Visibility Likelihood](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02980/) (2020)
- [Multiface: A Dataset for Neural Face Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11243/) (2022)
- [FML: Face Model Learning from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07603/) (2018)
- [3D face reconstruction with dense landmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02776/) (2022)
- [High-fidelity 3D GAN Inversion by Pseudo-multi-view Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15662/) (2022)
- [6D Rotation Representation For Unconstrained Head Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12555/) (2022)
- [ImFace: A Nonlinear 3D Morphable Face Model with Implicit Neural Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14510/) (2022)
- [Context Modeling in 3D Human Pose Estimation: A Unified Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15507/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [SEREP: Semantic Facial Expression Representation for Robust In-the-Wild Capture and Retargeting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14371/) (2024)
- [Electromyography-Informed Facial Expression Reconstruction for Physiological-Based Synthesis and Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09556/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

3D facial landmark localization has proven to be of particular use for applications, such as face tracking, 3D face modeling, and image-based 3D face reconstruction. In the supervised learning case, such methods usually rely on 3D landmark datasets derived from 3DMM-based registration that often lack spatial definition alignment, as compared with that chosen by hand-labeled human consensus, e.g., how are eyebrow landmarks defined? This creates a gap between landmark datasets generated via high-quality 2D human labels and 3DMMs, and it ultimately limits their effectiveness. To address this issue, we introduce a novel semi-supervised learning approach that learns 3D landmarks by directly lifting (visible) hand-labeled 2D landmarks and ensures better definition alignment, without the need for 3D landmark datasets. To lift 2D landmarks to 3D, we leverage 3D-aware GANs for better multi-view consistency learning and in-the-wild multi-frame videos for robust cross-generalization. Empirical experiments demonstrate that our method not only achieves better definition alignment between 2D-3D landmarks but also outperforms other supervised learning 3D landmark localization methods on both 3DMM labeled and photogrammetric ground truth evaluation datasets. Project Page: https://davidcferman.github.io/FaceLift