Locating Facial Features with an Extended Active Shape Model

We make some simple extensions to the Active Shape Model of Cootes et al. [4], and use it to locate features in frontal views of upright faces. We show on independent test data that with the extensions the Active Shape Model compares favorably with more sophisticated methods. The extensions are (i) fitting more landmarks than are actually needed (ii) selectively using twoinstead of one-dimensional landmark templates (iii) adding noise to the training set (iv) relaxing the shape model where advantageous (v) trimming covariance matrices by setting most entries to zero, and (vi) stacking two Active Shape Models in series.