  We present a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) design for facial
landmark coordinate regression. We examine the intermediate features of a
standard CNN trained for landmark detection and show that features extracted
from later, more specialized layers capture rough landmark locations. This
provides a natural means of applying differential treatment midway through the
network, tweaking processing based on facial alignment. The resulting Tweaked
CNN model (TCNN) harnesses the robustness of CNNs for landmark detection, in an
appearance-sensitive manner without training multi-part or multi-scale models.
Our results on standard face landmark detection and face verification
benchmarks show TCNN to surpasses previously published performances by wide
margins.
