Daily Papers

We present DAD-3DHeads, a dense and diverse large-scale dataset, and a robust model for 3D Dense Head Alignment in the wild. It contains annotations of over 3.5K landmarks that accurately represent 3D head shape compared to the ground-truth scans. The data-driven model, DAD-3DNet, trained on our dataset, learns shape, expression, and pose parameters, and performs 3D reconstruction of a FLAME mesh. The model also incorporates a landmark prediction branch to take advantage of rich supervision and co-training of multiple related tasks. Experimentally, DAD-3DNet outperforms or is comparable to the state-of-the-art models in (i) 3D Head Pose Estimation on AFLW2000-3D and BIWI, (ii) 3D Face Shape Reconstruction on NoW and Feng, and (iii) 3D Dense Head Alignment and 3D Landmarks Estimation on DAD-3DHeads dataset. Finally, the diversity of DAD-3DHeads in camera angles, facial expressions, and occlusions enables a benchmark to study in-the-wild generalization and robustness to distribution shifts. The dataset webpage is https://p.farm/research/dad-3dheads.

We propose real-time, six degrees of freedom (6DoF), 3D face pose estimation without face detection or landmark localization. We observe that estimating the 6DoF rigid transformation of a face is a simpler problem than facial landmark detection, often used for 3D face alignment. In addition, 6DoF offers more information than face bounding box labels. We leverage these observations to make multiple contributions: (a) We describe an easily trained, efficient, Faster R-CNN--based model which regresses 6DoF pose for all faces in the photo, without preliminary face detection. (b) We explain how pose is converted and kept consistent between the input photo and arbitrary crops created while training and evaluating our model. (c) Finally, we show how face poses can replace detection bounding box training labels. Tests on AFLW2000-3D and BIWI show that our method runs at real-time and outperforms state of the art (SotA) face pose estimators. Remarkably, our method also surpasses SotA models of comparable complexity on the WIDER FACE detection benchmark, despite not been optimized on bounding box labels.