  In this paper we propose a supervised initialization scheme for cascaded face
alignment based on explicit head pose estimation. We first investigate the
failure cases of most state of the art face alignment approaches and observe
that these failures often share one common global property, i.e. the head pose
variation is usually large. Inspired by this, we propose a deep convolutional
network model for reliable and accurate head pose estimation. Instead of using
a mean face shape, or randomly selected shapes for cascaded face alignment
initialisation, we propose two schemes for generating initialisation: the first
one relies on projecting a mean 3D face shape (represented by 3D facial
landmarks) onto 2D image under the estimated head pose; the second one searches
nearest neighbour shapes from the training set according to head pose distance.
By doing so, the initialisation gets closer to the actual shape, which enhances
the possibility of convergence and in turn improves the face alignment
performance. We demonstrate the proposed method on the benchmark 300W dataset
and show very competitive performance in both head pose estimation and face
alignment.
