  Face Alignment is an active computer vision domain, that consists in
localizing a number of facial landmarks that vary across datasets.
State-of-the-art face alignment methods either consist in end-to-end
regression, or in refining the shape in a cascaded manner, starting from an
initial guess. In this paper, we introduce DeCaFA, an end-to-end deep
convolutional cascade architecture for face alignment. DeCaFA uses
fully-convolutional stages to keep full spatial resolution throughout the
cascade. Between each cascade stage, DeCaFA uses multiple chained transfer
layers with spatial softmax to produce landmark-wise attention maps for each of
several landmark alignment tasks. Weighted intermediate supervision, as well as
efficient feature fusion between the stages allow to learn to progressively
refine the attention maps in an end-to-end manner. We show experimentally that
DeCaFA significantly outperforms existing approaches on 300W, CelebA and WFLW
databases. In addition, we show that DeCaFA can learn fine alignment with
reasonable accuracy from very few images using coarsely annotated data.
