RCFormer: Reliability-aware Context Transformer for Occlusion-Robust Facial Landmark Detection

Abstract

Facial landmark detection has advanced substantially under regular imaging conditions, yet occlusion, poor illumination, and large pose changes remain major sources of error because local facial evidence can become incomplete or misleading. Context-guided latent patch recovery offers a promising way to address this issue by inferring unreliable patch representations from surrounding facial context before heatmap prediction. However, the recovered context can itself be unreliable when it is weakly adapted to the input face, influenced by corrupted neighboring patches, or blended without preserving local spatial coherence. We propose RCFormer, a Reliability-aware Context Transformer for occlusion-robust facial landmark detection. RCFormer strengthens latent patch recovery with three reliability-oriented components: visible-context conditioning (VCC), which adapts the context representation using a visibility-weighted global facial summary; visibility-guided context aggregation (VGCA), which reduces the influence of unreliable source patches during attention; and spatial residual correction (SRC), which refines blended latent features using neighboring patch information. The recovered heatmaps are then used as reliability-aware structural cues for existing landmark detection networks. Experiments show that RCFormer improves heatmap recovery and achieves strong landmark localization results on the WFLW, COFW, and 300W datasets.