A Comprehensive Performance Evaluation of Deformable Face Tracking "In-the-Wild"

TL;DR

This paper provides the first comprehensive quantitative evaluation of deformable face tracking methods in unconstrained 'in-the-wild' conditions using the 300VW benchmark, comparing various architectures and strategies.

Contribution

It introduces a thorough, quantitative assessment of state-of-the-art deformable face tracking pipelines in real-world scenarios, highlighting strengths and areas for improvement.

Findings

Hybrid approaches outperform purely generic methods

Model-free tracking shows promising results in challenging conditions

Evaluation identifies key directions for future research

Abstract

Recently, technologies such as face detection, facial landmark localisation and face recognition and verification have matured enough to provide effective and efficient solutions for imagery captured under arbitrary conditions (referred to as "in-the-wild"). This is partially attributed to the fact that comprehensive "in-the-wild" benchmarks have been developed for face detection, landmark localisation and recognition/verification. A very important technology that has not been thoroughly evaluated yet is deformable face tracking "in-the-wild". Until now, the performance has mainly been assessed qualitatively by visually assessing the result of a deformable face tracking technology on short videos. In this paper, we perform the first, to the best of our knowledge, thorough evaluation of state-of-the-art deformable face tracking pipelines using the recently introduced 300VW benchmark. We evaluate many different architectures focusing mainly on the task of on-line deformable face tracking. In particular, we compare the following general strategies: (a) generic face detection plus generic facial landmark localisation, (b) generic model free tracking plus generic facial landmark localisation, as well as (c) hybrid approaches using state-of-the-art face detection, model free tracking and facial landmark localisation technologies. Our evaluation reveals future avenues for further research on the topic.