A new facial feature extraction method based on linear combination model

A new facial feature extraction method is proposed. Based on linear combination model, the method locates feature points in facial images precisely. The model uses the knowledge of prototypic faces to interpret novel faces. To get the knowledge, the prototypes are labeled manually on the feature points. Generally, the construction of the linear combination model depends on pixel-wise alignments of prototypes, and the alignments are computed by an optical flow algorithm or bootstrapping algorithm which is a full-scale optimization and not includes local information such as facial feature points. To combine local facial feature with the linear combination model, a restrained optical flow algorithm is proposed to compute the pixel-wise alignments. With the information of labeled feature points, the model matches the input facial images and extracts the feature points automatically. Implementing the feature extraction method on the MPI face database, the experimental results show that the method has good performance.