Statistical approaches for building non-rigid deformable
models, such as the Active Appearance Model (AAM), have
enjoyed great popularity in recent years, but typically require
tedious manual annotation of training images. In this
paper, a learning based approach for the automatic annotation
of visually deformable objects from a single annotated
frontal image is presented and demonstrated on the
example of automatically annotating face images that can
be used for building AAMs for fitting and tracking. This
approach employs the idea of initially learning the correspondences
between landmarks in a frontal image and a set
of training images with a face in arbitrary poses. Using
this learner, virtual images of unseen faces at any arbitrary
pose for which the learner was trained can be reconstructed
by predicting the new landmark locations and warping the
texture from the frontal image. View-based AAMs are then
built from the virtual images and used for automatically annota...