Poster
Heatmap Regression without Soft-Argmax for Facial Landmark Detection
Chiao-An Yang · Raymond Yeh
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Abstract
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Abstract:
Facial landmark detection is an important task in computer vision with numerous downstream applications, such as head pose estimation, expression analysis, face swapping, etc. Heatmap regression-based methods have been a strong contender in achieving state-of-the-art results in this task. These methods involve computing the argmax over the heatmaps to predict a landmark. As argmax is not differentiable, to enable end-to-end training on deep-nets, these methods rely on a differentiable approximation of argmax, namely Soft-argmax. In this work, we revisit this long-standing choice of using Soft-argmax and find that it may not be necessary. Instead, we propose an alternative training objective based on the classic structured prediction framework. Empirically, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on three facial landmark benchmarks (WFLW, COFW, and 300W) with faster training convergence by roughly $2.2\times$ while maintaining intuitive design choices in our model.
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