Hierarchical face parsing via deep learning

This paper investigates how to parse (segment) facial components from face images which may be partially occluded. We propose a novel face parser, which recasts segmentation of face components as a cross-modality data transformation problem, i.e., transforming an image patch to a label map. Specifically, a face is represented hierarchically by parts, components, and pixel-wise labels. With this representation, our approach first detects faces at both the part- and component-levels, and then computes the pixel-wise label maps (Fig.1). Our part-based and component-based detectors are generatively trained with the deep belief network (DBN), and are discriminatively tuned by logistic regression. The segmentators transform the detected face components to label maps, which are obtained by learning a highly nonlinear mapping with the deep autoencoder. The proposed hierarchical face parsing is not only robust to partial occlusions but also provide richer information for face analysis and face synthesis compared with face keypoint detection and face alignment. The effectiveness of our algorithm is shown through several tasks on 2, 239 images selected from three datasets (e.g., LFW 12, BioID 13 and CUFSF 29).