V-Head: Face Detection and Alignment for Facial Augmented Reality Applications

Efficient and accurate face detection and alignment are key techniques for facial augmented reality (AR) applications. In this paper, we introduce V-Head, a facial AR system which consists of three major components: (1) joint face detection and shape initialization which can efficiently localize facial regions based on the proposed face probability map and a multipose classifier and meanwhile explicitly produces a roughly aligned initial shape, (2) cascade face alignment to locate 2D facial landmarks on the detected face, and (3) 3D head pose estimation based on the perspective-n-point (PnP) algorithm so as to overlay 3D virtual objects on the detected faces. The demonstration can be accessed from https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B-H2fYiPunUtRHBFTDRzRkZvVEE.