The Menpo project

The Menpo Project [1] is a BSD-licensed set of tools and software designed to provide an end-to-end pipeline for collection and annotation of image and 3D mesh data. In particular, the Menpo Project provides tools for annotating images and meshes with a sparse set of fiducial markers that we refer to as landmarks. For example, Figure 1 shows an example of a face image that has been annotated with 68 2D landmarks. These landmarks are useful in a variety of areas in Computer Vision and Machine Learning including object detection, deformable modelling and tracking. The Menpo Project aims to enable researchers, practitioners and students to easily annotate new data sources and to investigate existing datasets. Of most interest to the Computer Vision is the fact that The Menpo Project contains completely open source implementations of a number of state-of-the-art algorithms for face detection and deformable model building . In the Menpo Project, we are actively developing and contributing to the state-of-the-art in deformable modelling [2], [3], [4], [5]. Characteristic examples of widely used state-of-the-art deformable model algorithms are Active Appearance Models [6],[7], Constrained Local Models [8], [9] and Supervised Descent Method [10]. However, there is still a noteworthy lack of high quality open source software in this area. Most existing packages are encrypted, compiled, non-maintained, partly documented, badly structured or difficult to modify. This makes them unsuitable for adoption in cutting edge scientific research. Consequently, research becomes even more difficult since performing a fair comparison between existing methods is, in most cases, infeasible. For this reason, we believe the Menpo Project represents an important contribution towards open science in the area of deformable modelling. We also believe it is important for deformable modelling to move beyond the established area of facial annotations and to extend to a wide variety of deformable object classes. We hope Menpo can accelerate this progress by providing all of our tools completely free and permissively licensed.