Annotated Facial Landmarks in the Wild: A large-scale, real-world database for facial landmark localization

Face alignment is a crucial step in face recognition tasks. Especially, using landmark localization for geometric face normalization has shown to be very effective, clearly improving the recognition results. However, no adequate databases exist that provide a sufficient number of annotated facial landmarks. The databases are either limited to frontal views, provide only a small number of annotated images or have been acquired under controlled conditions. Hence, we introduce a novel database overcoming these limitations: Annotated Facial Landmarks in the Wild (AFLW). AFLW provides a large-scale collection of images gathered from Flickr, exhibiting a large variety in face appearance (e.g., pose, expression,…