Sogou, an innovator in search and a leader in China's internet industry, ranked first in the Grand Challenge of 106-Point Facial Landmark Localization at the 25th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR 2020), a premier global conference on pattern recognition hosted by the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IADR). This demonstrates Sogou's industry leading technological strengths and innovative breakthroughs, particularly in the computer vision space.As facial landmark localization is crucial for numerous face related applications, such as face alignment for recognition, facial pose estimation, face image synthesis, etc., it has become a subject undergoing intense research by both academia and industrial practitioners.The Grand Challenge of 106-Point Facial Landmark Localization sets high standards for the accuracy and robustness of algorithm's generalization ability. Its dataset contains images with larger variations in identity, pose, expression and occlusion, as well as a stricter limit of model weights employed for computational efficiency. Sogou's AI Interaction Division took top spots in both the validation phase and final evaluation, leading a number of top teams from enterprises and research institutes, such as OPPO, Meituan and Xi'an Jiaotong University. Leveraging breakthrough technologies such as enhanced HRNet-based structure and group convolution network, the Sogou team guaranteed the algorithm's accuracy and efficiently reduced the complexity of the facial landmark localization model. In addition, the team also adopted Pose-based Data Balancing (PDB) strategy to better leverage predicted position of the corresponding landmark and solve unbalanced data under various positions.Sogou has long maintained a strong momentum in research and development of computer vision technologies. It has achieved leading results at multiple international challenges, including the first prize in the CVPR 2018 Workshop on Autonomous Driving Challenge, and top scoring in the MegaFace Million-Scale Face Recognition Challenge with an accuracy rate of 99.939%.Sogou believes that the exploration of cutting-edge AI technologies in facial recognition, voice recognition and natural language processing will fully empower its products and services in the future, providing the best user experience possible.
Sogou ranks first in ‘facial landmark’ challenge
