Multi-task convolution network for face alignment

In order to solve face alignment more effectively, we proposed a multi-task deep convolution network for face alignment, which achieves good performance even in the case of large pose variations and severe occlusion. Instead of dealing with face alignment as a single task, we jointly trained the auxiliary task of pose estimation together with face alignment to guide the distribution of facial points. By doing so we are able to 1) avoid trapping in the local optimum due to the inaccurate face boxes, 2) improve the robustness in dealing with faces with pose variation and severe occlusion. Compared with the traditional methods, our method also improves the accuracy by providing better initialization instead of mean shape. Extensive experiments show that our method has great performance on various benchmarks.