• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.11-20
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• 2007

AAM has been successfully applied to face alignment, but its performance is very sensitive to initial values. In this paper, we propose a face alignment method using progressive AAM. The proposed method consists of two stages; modelling and relation derivation stage and fitting stage. Modelling and relation derivation stage first builds two AAM models; the inner face AAM model and the whole face AAM model and then derive the relation matrix between the inner face AAM model parameter vector and the whole face AAM model parameter vector. The fitting stage is processed progressively in two phases. In the first phase, the proposed method finds the feature parameters for the inner facial feature points of a new face, and then in the second phase it localizes the whole facial feature points of the new face using the initial values estimated utilizing the inner feature parameters obtained in the first phase and the relation matrix obtained in the first stage. Through experiments, it is verified that the proposed progressive AAM-based face alignment method is more robust with respect to pose, and face background than the conventional basic AAM-based face alignment.