Repurposing Labeled Photographs for Facial Tracking with Alternative Camera Intrinsics

Acquiring manually labeled training data for a specific application is expensive and while such data is often fully available for casual camera imagery, it is not a good fit for novel cameras. To overcome this, we present a repurposing approach that relies on spherical image warping to retarget an existing dataset of landmark labeled casual photography of people's faces with arbitrary poses from regular camera lenses to target cameras with significantly different intrinsics, such as those often attached to the head mounted displays (HMDs) with wide-angle lenses necessary to observe mouth and other features at close proximity and infrared only sensing for eye observations. Our method can predict landmarks of the HMD wearer in facial sub-regions in a divide-and-conquer fashion with particular focus on mouth and eyes. We demonstrate animated avatars in realtime using the face landmarks as input without user-specific nor application-specific dataset.