At the end of the introduction to this instructive kaggle competition, they state that the methods used in "Viola and Jones' seminal paper works quite well". However, that paper describes a system for binary facial recognition, and the problem being addressed is the classification of keypoints, not entire images. I am having a hard time figuring out how, exactly, I would go about adjusting the Viola/Jones system for keypoint recognition.
I assume I should train a separate classifier for each keypoint, and some ideas I have are:
iterate over sub-images of a fixed size and classify each one, where an image with a keypoint as center pixel is a positive example. In this case I'm not sure what I would do with pixels close to the edge of the image.
instead of training binary classifiers, train classifiers with l*w possible classes (one for each pixel). The big problem with this is that I suspect it will be prohibitively slow, as every weak classifier suddenly has to do l*w*original operations
the third idea I have isn't totally hashed out in my mind, but since the keypoints are each parts of a greater part of a face (left, right center of an eye, for example), maybe I could try to classify sub-images as just an eye, and then use the left, right, and center pixels (centered in the y coordinate) of the best-fit subimage for each face-part
Is there any merit to these ideas, and are there methods I haven't thought of?
I ended up working on this problem extensively. I used "deep learning," aka several layers of neural networks. I used convolutional networks. You can learn more about them by checking out these demos:
http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/convnetjs/demo/mnist.html
http://deeplearning.net/tutorial/lenet.html#lenet
I made the following changes to a typical convolutional network:
I did not do any down-sampling, as any loss of precision directly translates to a decrease in the model's score
I did n-way binary classification, with each pixel being classified as a keypoint or non-keypoint (#2 in the things I listed in my original post). As I suspected, computational complexity was the primary barrier here. I tried to use my GPU to overcome these issues, but the number of parameters in the neural network were too large to fit in GPU memory, so I ended up using an xl amazon instance for training.
Here's a github repo with some of the work I did: https://github.com/cowpig/deep_keypoints
Anyway, given that deep learning has blown up in popularity, there are surely people who have done this much better than I did, and published papers about it. Here's a write-up that looks pretty good: