UGLLI Face Alignment: Estimating Uncertainty with Gaussian Log-Likelihood Loss

Modern face alignment methods have become quite accurate at predicting the locations of facial landmarks, but they do not typically estimate the uncertainty of their predicted locations. In this paper, we present a novel frame-work for jointly predicting facial landmark locations and the associated uncertainties, modeled as 2D Gaussian distributions, using Gaussian log-likelihood loss. Not only does our joint estimation of uncertainty and landmark locations yield state-of-the-art estimates of the uncertainty of predicted landmark locations, but it also yields state-of-the-art estimates for the landmark locations (face alignment). Our method's estimates of the uncertainty of landmarks' predicted locations could be used to automatically identify input images on which face alignment fails, which can be critical for downstream tasks.