Semi-supervised facial landmark annotation

Landmark annotation for training images is essential for many learning tasks in computer vision, such as object detection, tracking, and alignment. Image annotation is typically conducted manually, which is both labor-intensive and error-prone. To improve this process, this paper proposes a new approach to estimating the locations of a set of landmarks for a large image ensemble using manually annotated landmarks for only a small number of images in the ensemble. Our approach, named semi-supervised leastsquares congealing, aims to minimize an objective function defined on both annotated and unannotated images. A shape model is learned online to constrain the landmark configuration. We employ an iterative coarse-to-fine patch-based scheme together with a greedy patch selection strategy for landmark location estimation. Extensive experiments on facial images show that our approach can reliably and accurately annotate landmarks for a large image ensemble starting with a small number of manually annotated images, under several challenging scenarios. 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.