SHAPE EVALUATION FOR WEIGHTED ACTIVE SHAPE MODELS

Active Shape Models (ASM) is a powerful statistical tool for face alignment. However, no evaluation is performed on the final results. Nevertheless, the shape evaluation information is very useful for the search and the final results. In this paper, a shape evaluation method and a new search algorithm, called weighted ASM, are proposed. The shape evaluation is based on the local appearance model of ASM to determine how well the searching shape match models derived from the training set. It is used to guide the search procedure to get more accurate results. The weighted-ASM also uses this evaluation information to project the searching shape into the solution shape space in a weighted way. Compared with ASM’s orthogonal projection, the weighted projection can drag the search out of local minima to be more accurate and more robust. Experiments have been done to show the ability of this method to align shapes.