face alignment algorithm on images

Question

How can I do a basic face alignment on a 2-dimensional image with the assumption that I have the position/coordinates of the mouth and eyes.

Is there any algorithm that I could implement to correct the face alignment on images?

Answer 1

Face (or image) alignment refers to aligning one image (or face in your case) with respect to another (or a reference image/face). It is also referred to as image registration. You can do that using either appearance (intensity-based registration) or key-point locations (feature-based registration). The second category stems from image motion models where one image is considered a displaced version of the other.

In your case the landmark locations (3 points for eyes and nose?) provide a good reference set for straightforward feature-based registration. Assuming you have the location of a set of points in both of the 2D images, x_1 and x_2 you can estimate a similarity transform (rotation, translation, scaling), i.e. a planar 2D transform S that maps x_1 to x_2. You can additionally add reflection to that, though for faces this will most-likely be unnecessary.

Estimation can be done by forming the normal equations and solving a linear least-squares (LS) problem for the x_1 = Sx_2 system using linear regression. For the 5 unknown parameters (2 rotation, 2 translation, 1 scaling) you will need 3 points (2.5 to be precise) for solving 5 equations. Solution to the above LS can be obtained through Direct Linear Transform (e.g. by applying SVD or a matrix pseudo-inverse). For cases of a sufficiently large number of reference points (i.e. automatically detected) a RANSAC-type method for point filtering and uncertainty removal (though this is not your case here).

After estimating S, apply image warping on the second image to get the transformed grid (pixel) coordinates of the entire image 2. The transform will change pixel locations but not their appearance. Unavoidably some of the transformed regions of image 2 will lie outside the grid of image 1, and you can decide on the values for those null locations (e.g. 0, NaN etc.).

For more details: R. Szeliski, "Image Alignment and Stitching: A Tutorial" (Section 4.3 "Geometric Registration")

In OpenCV see: Geometric Image Transformations, e.g. cv::getRotationMatrix2D cv::getAffineTransform and cv::warpAffine. Note though that you should estimate and apply a similarity transform (special case of an affine) in order to preserve angles and shapes.

Answer 2

For the face there is lot of variability in feature points. So it won't be possible to do a perfect fit of all feature points by just affine transforms. The only way to align all the points perfectly is to warp the image given the points. Basically you can do a triangulation of image given the points and do a affine warp of each triangle to get the warped image where all the points are aligned.