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Facial Expression Recognition by Using a Disentangled Identity-Invariant Expression Representation

Kamran Ali, Charles Hughes

Auto-TLDR; Transfer-based Expression Recognition Generative Adversarial Network (TER-GAN)

Abstract Slides Poster

Facial Expression Recognition (FER) is a challenging task because many factors of variation such as pose, illumination, and identity-specific attributes are entangled with the expression information in an expressive face image. Recent works show that the performance of a FER algorithm can be improved by disentangling the expression information from identity features. In this paper, we present Transfer-based Expression Recognition Generative Adversarial Network (TER-GAN) that combines the effectiveness of a novel feature disentanglement technique with the concept of identity-invariant expression representation learning for facial expression recognition. More specifically, TER-GAN learns a disentangled expression representation by extracting expression features from one image and transferring the expression information to the identity of another image. To improve the feature disentanglement process, and to learn an identity-invariant expression representation, we introduce a novel expression consistency loss and an identity consistency loss that exploit expression and identity information from both real and synthetic images. We evaluated the performance of our proposed facial expression recognition technique by employing five public facial expression databases, CK+, Oulu-CASIA, MMI, BU-3DFE, and BU-4DFE, the latter being used for pre-training. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed technique.

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Deep Multi-Task Learning for Facial Expression Recognition and Synthesis Based on Selective Feature Sharing

Rui Zhao, Tianshan Liu, Jun Xiao, P. K. Daniel Lun, Kin-Man Lam

Auto-TLDR; Multi-task Learning for Facial Expression Recognition and Synthesis

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Multi-task learning is an effective learning strategy for deep-learning-based facial expression recognition tasks. However, most existing methods take into limited consideration the feature selection, when transferring information between different tasks, which may lead to task interference when training the multi-task networks. To address this problem, we propose a novel selective feature-sharing method, and establish a multi-task network for facial expression recognition and facial expression synthesis. The proposed method can effectively transfer beneficial features between different tasks, while filtering out useless and harmful information. Moreover, we employ the facial expression synthesis task to enlarge and balance the training dataset to further enhance the generalization ability of the proposed method. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on those commonly used facial expression recognition benchmarks, which makes it a potential solution to real-world facial expression recognition problems.

Identity-Aware Facial Expression Recognition in Compressed Video

Xiaofeng Liu, Linghao Jin, Xu Han, Jun Lu, Jonghye Woo, Jane You

Auto-TLDR; Exploring Facial Expression Representation in Compressed Video with Mutual Information Minimization

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This paper targets to explore the inter-subject variations eliminated facial expression representation in the compressed video domain. Most of the previous methods process the RGB images of a sequence, while the off-the-shelf and valuable expression-related muscle movement already embedded in the compression format. In the up to two orders of magnitude compressed domain, we can explicitly infer the expression from the residual frames and possible to extract identity factors from the I frame with a pre-trained face recognition network. By enforcing the marginal independent of them, the expression feature is expected to be purer for the expression and be robust to identity shifts. Specifically, we propose a novel collaborative min-min game for mutual information (MI) minimization in latent space. We do not need the identity label or multiple expression samples from the same person for identity elimination. Moreover, when the apex frame is annotated in the dataset, the complementary constraint can be further added to regularize the feature-level game. In testing, only the compressed residual frames are required to achieve expression prediction. Our solution can achieve comparable or better performance than the recent decoded image based methods on the typical FER benchmarks with about 3$\times$ faster inference with compressed data.

Video-Based Facial Expression Recognition Using Graph Convolutional Networks

Daizong Liu, Hongting Zhang, Pan Zhou

Auto-TLDR; Graph Convolutional Network for Video-based Facial Expression Recognition

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Facial expression recognition (FER), aiming to classify the expression present in the facial image or video, has attracted a lot of research interests in the field of artificial intelligence and multimedia. In terms of video based FER task, it is sensible to capture the dynamic expression variation among the frames to recognize facial expression. However, existing methods directly utilize CNN-RNN or 3D CNN to extract the spatial-temporal features from different facial units, instead of concentrating on a certain region during expression variation capturing, which leads to limited performance in FER. In our paper, we introduce a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) layer into a common CNN-RNN based model for video-based FER. First, the GCN layer is utilized to learn more contributing facial expression features which concentrate on certain regions after sharing information between nodes those represent CNN extracted features. Then, a LSTM layer is applied to learn long-term dependencies among the GCN learned features to model the variation. In addition, a weight assignment mechanism is also designed to weight the output of different nodes for final classification by characterizing the expression intensities in each frame. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time to use GCN in FER task. We evaluate our method on three widely-used datasets, CK+, Oulu-CASIA and MMI, and also one challenging wild dataset AFEW8.0, and the experimental results demonstrate that our method has superior performance to existing methods.

Unsupervised Disentangling of Viewpoint and Residues Variations by Substituting Representations for Robust Face Recognition

Minsu Kim, Joanna Hong, Junho Kim, Hong Joo Lee, Yong Man Ro

Auto-TLDR; Unsupervised Disentangling of Identity, viewpoint, and Residue Representations for Robust Face Recognition

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

It is well-known that identity-unrelated variations (e.g., viewpoint or illumination) degrade the performances of face recognition methods. In order to handle this challenge, a robust method for disentangling the identity and view representations has drawn an attention in the machine learning area. However, existing methods learn discriminative features which require a manual supervision of such factors of variations. In this paper, we propose a novel disentangling framework through modeling three representations of identity, viewpoint, and residues (i.e., identity and pose unrelated) which do not require supervision of the variations. By jointly modeling the three representations, we enhance the disentanglement of each representation and achieve robust face recognition performance. Further, the learned viewpoint representation can be utilized for pose estimation or editing of a posed facial image. Extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations verify the effectiveness of our proposed method which disentangles identity, viewpoint, and residues of facial images.

Attentive Hybrid Feature Based a Two-Step Fusion for Facial Expression Recognition

Jun Weng, Yang Yang, Zichang Tan, Zhen Lei

Auto-TLDR; Attentive Hybrid Architecture for Facial Expression Recognition

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Facial expression recognition is inherently a challenging task, especially for the in-the-wild images with various occlusions and large pose variations, which may lead to the loss of some crucial information. To address it, in this paper, we propose an attentive hybrid architecture (AHA) which learns global, local and integrated features based on different face regions. Compared with one type of feature, our extracted features own complementary information and can reduce the loss of crucial information. Specifically, AHA contains three branches, where all sub-networks in those branches employ the attention mechanism to further localize the interested pixels/regions. Moreover, we propose a two-step fusion strategy based on LSTM to deeply explore the hidden correlations among different face regions. Extensive experiments on four popular expression databases (i.e., CK+, FER-2013, SFEW 2.0, RAF-DB) show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Unconstrained Facial Expression Recogniton Based on Cascade Decision and Gabor Filters

Yanhong Wu, Lijie Zhang, Guannan Chen, Pablo Navarrete Michelini

Auto-TLDR; Convolutional Neural Network for Facial Expression Recognition under unconstrained natural conditions

Abstract Slides Similar

Facial Expression Recognition (FER) research with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) has been active, especially under unconstrained natural conditions. From our observation, prior arts treat expressions equally in classification and the reconition accuracy of some expression are always higher than others. In this paper, we make the assumption that an expression with a higher accuracy is easier to be recognized, and those expressions easier to recognize will hinder the recognition of uneasy expressions. Then, we propose a novel algorithm for unconstrained FER based on cascade decision and Gabor filters. Easier expressions are recognized before the difficult expressions. This simple method trains up to five models to cascadedly recognize a given facial image expression. The first binary classifier model is for the classification of Happy with the highest accuracy. The second binary classifier model is for the classification of Surprise with the second high accuracy. The third binary classifier model is for the classification of Neutral with the third high accuracy. The forth model is for the classification of Sad with the forth high accuracy. And the final model is 3-class classifier for Angry, Disgust and Fear. Gabor filters are included in every model to enhance robustness on illumination variations and face poses. Extensive experiment results on several datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. We obtain accuracy of 77.6% on FER2013 with the final models, outperforming the latest state-of-the-arts.

Dual-MTGAN: Stochastic and Deterministic Motion Transfer for Image-To-Video Synthesis

Fu-En Yang, Jing-Cheng Chang, Yuan-Hao Lee, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang

Auto-TLDR; Dual Motion Transfer GAN for Convolutional Neural Networks

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Generating videos with content and motion variations is a challenging task in computer vision. While the recent development of GAN allows video generation from latent representations, it is not easy to produce videos with particular content of motion patterns of interest. In this paper, we propose Dual Motion Transfer GAN (Dual-MTGAN), which takes image and video data as inputs while learning disentangled content and motion representations. Our Dual-MTGAN is able to perform deterministic motion transfer and stochastic motion generation. Based on a given image, the former preserves the input content and transfers motion patterns observed from another video sequence, and the latter directly produces videos with plausible yet diverse motion patterns based on the input image. The proposed model is trained in an end-to-end manner, without the need to utilize pre-defined motion features like pose or facial landmarks. Our quantitative and qualitative results would confirm the effectiveness and robustness of our model in addressing such conditioned image-to-video tasks.

Learning Disentangled Representations for Identity Preserving Surveillance Face Camouflage

Jingzhi Li, Lutong Han, Hua Zhang, Xiaoguang Han, Jingguo Ge, Xiaochu Cao

Auto-TLDR; Individual Face Privacy under Surveillance Scenario with Multi-task Loss Function

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In this paper, we focus on protecting the person face privacy under the surveillance scenarios, whose goal is to change the visual appearances of faces while keep them to be recognizable by current face recognition systems. This is a challenging problem as that we should retain the most important structures of captured facial images, while alter the salient facial regions to protect personal privacy. To address this problem, we introduce a novel individual face protection model, which can camouflage the face appearance from the perspective of human visual perception and preserve the identity features of faces used for face authentication. To that end, we develop an encoder-decoder network architecture that can separately disentangle the person feature representation into an appearance code and an identity code. Specifically, we first randomly divide the face image into two groups, the source set and the target set, where the source set is used to extract the identity code and the target set provides the appearance code. Then, we recombine the identity and appearance codes to synthesize a new face, which has the same identity with the source subject. Finally, the synthesized faces are used to replace the original face to protect the privacy of individual. Furthermore, our model is trained end-to-end with a multi-task loss function, which can better preserve the identity and stabilize the training loss. Experiments conducted on Cross-Age Celebrity dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our model and validate our superiority in terms of visual quality and scalability.

SATGAN: Augmenting Age Biased Dataset for Cross-Age Face Recognition

Wenshuang Liu, Wenting Chen, Yuanlue Zhu, Linlin Shen

Auto-TLDR; SATGAN: Stable Age Translation GAN for Cross-Age Face Recognition

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In this paper, we propose a Stable Age Translation GAN (SATGAN) to generate fake face images at different ages to augment age biased face datasets for Cross-Age Face Recognition (CAFR) . The proposed SATGAN consists of both generator and discriminator. As a part of the generator, a novel Mask Attention Module (MAM) is introduced to make the generator focus on the face area. In addition, the generator employs a Uniform Distribution Discriminator (UDD) to supervise the learning of latent feature map and enforce the uniform distribution. Besides, the discriminator employs a Feature Separation Module (FSM) to disentangle identity information from the age information. The quantitative and qualitative evaluations on Morph dataset prove that SATGAN achieves much better performance than existing methods. The face recognition model trained using dataset (VGGFace2 and MS-Celeb-1M) augmented using our SATGAN achieves better accuracy on cross age dataset like Cross-Age LFW and AgeDB-30.

Unsupervised Face Manipulation Via Hallucination

Keerthy Kusumam, Enrique Sanchez, Georgios Tzimiropoulos

Auto-TLDR; Unpaired Face Image Manipulation using Autoencoders

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This paper addresses the problem of manipulatinga face image in terms of changing its pose. To achieve this, wepropose a new method that can be trained under the very general“unpaired” setting. To this end, we firstly propose to modelthe general appearance, layout and background of the inputimage using a low-resolution version of it which is progressivelypassed through a hallucination network to generate featuresat higher resolutions. We show that such a formulation issignificantly simpler than previous approaches for appearancemodelling based on autoencoders. Secondly, we propose a fullylearnable and spatially-aware appearance transfer module whichcan cope with misalignment between the input source image andthe target pose and can effectively combine the features fromthe hallucination network with the features produced by ourgenerator. Thirdly, we introduce an identity preserving methodthat is trained in an unsupervised way, by using an auxiliaryfeature extractor and a contrastive loss between the real andgenerated images. We compare our method against the state-of-the-art reporting significant improvements both quantitatively, interms of FID and IS, and qualitatively.

Learning Emotional Blinded Face Representations

Alejandro Peña Almansa, Julian Fierrez, Agata Lapedriza, Aythami Morales

Auto-TLDR; Blind Face Representations for Emotion Recognition

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This work proposes two new face representations that are blind to the expressions associated to emotional responses. This work is in part motivated by new international regulations for personal data protection, which force data controllers to protect any kind of sensitive information involved in automatic processes. The advances in affective computing have contributed to improve human-machine interfaces, but at the same time, the capacity to monitorize emotional responses trigger potential risks for humans, both in terms of fairness and privacy. We propose two different methods to learn these facial expression blinded features. We show that it is possible to eliminate information related to emotion recognition tasks, while the performance of subject verification, gender recognition, and ethnicity classification are just slightly affected. We also present an application to train fairer classifiers over a protected facial expression attribute. The results demonstrate that it is possible to reduce emotional information in the face representation while retaining competitive performance in other face-based artificial intelligence tasks.

Facial Expression Recognition Using Residual Masking Network

Luan Pham, Vu Huynh, Tuan Anh Tran

Auto-TLDR; Deep Residual Masking for Automatic Facial Expression Recognition

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Automatic facial expression recognition (FER) has gained much attention due to its applications in human-computer interaction. Among the approaches to improve FER tasks, this paper focuses on deep architecture with the attention mechanism. We propose a novel Masking idea to boost the performance of CNN in facial expression task. It uses a segmentation network to refine feature maps, enabling the network to focus on relevant information to make correct decisions. In experiments, we combine the ubiquitous Deep Residual Network and Unet-like architecture to produce a Residual Masking Network. The proposed method holds state-of-the-art (SOTA) accuracy on the well-known FER2013 and private VEMO datasets. Our works are available on Github.

Exemplar Guided Cross-Spectral Face Hallucination Via Mutual Information Disentanglement

Haoxue Wu, Huaibo Huang, Aijing Yu, Jie Cao, Zhen Lei, Ran He

Auto-TLDR; Exemplar Guided Cross-Spectral Face Hallucination with Structural Representation Learning

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Recently, many Near infrared-visible (NIR-VIS) heterogeneous face recognition (HFR) methods have been proposed in the community. But it remains a challenging problem because of the sensing gap along with large pose variations. In this paper, we propose an Exemplar Guided Cross-Spectral Face Hallucination (EGCH) to reduce the domain discrepancy through disentangled representation learning. For each modality, EGCH contains a spectral encoder as well as a structure encoder to disentangle spectral and structure representation, respectively. It also contains a traditional generator that reconstructs the input from the above two representations, and a structure generator that predicts the facial parsing map from the structure representation. Besides, mutual information minimization and maximization are conducted to boost disentanglement and make representations adequately expressed. Then the translation is built on structure representations between two modalities. Provided with the transformed NIR structure representation and original VIS spectral representation, EGCH is capable to produce high-fidelity VIS images that preserve the topology structure of the input NIR while transfer the spectral information of an arbitrary VIS exemplar. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves more promising results both qualitatively and quantitatively than the state-of-the-art NIR-VIS methods.

Contrastive Data Learning for Facial Pose and Illumination Normalization

Gee-Sern Hsu, Chia-Hao Tang

Auto-TLDR; Pose and Illumination Normalization with Contrast Data Learning for Face Recognition

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Face normalization can be a crucial step when handling generic face recognition. We propose the Pose and Illumination Normalization (PIN) framework with contrast data learning for face normalization. The PIN framework is designed to learn the transformation from a source set to a target set. The source set and the target set compose a contrastive data set for learning. The source set contains faces collected in the wild and thus covers a wide range of variation across illumination, pose, expression and other variables. The target set contains face images taken under controlled conditions and all faces are in frontal pose and balanced in illumination. The PIN framework is composed of an encoder, a decoder and two discriminators. The encoder is made of a state-of-the-art face recognition network and acts as a facial feature extractor, which is not updated during training. The decoder is trained on both the source and target sets, and aims to learn the transformation from the source set to the target set; and therefore, it can transform an arbitrary face into a illumination and pose normalized face. The discriminators are trained to ensure the photo-realistic quality of the normalized face images generated by the decoder. The loss functions employed in the decoder and discriminators are appropriately designed and weighted for yielding better normalization outcomes and recognition performance. We verify the performance of the propose framework on several benchmark databases, and compare with state-of-the-art approaches.

Pixel-based Facial Expression Synthesis

Arbish Akram, Nazar Khan

Auto-TLDR; pixel-based facial expression synthesis using GANs

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Recently, Facial expression synthesis has shown remarkable advances with the advent of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). However, these GAN-based approaches mostly generate photo-realistic results as long as the target data distribution is close to the training data distribution. The quality of GANs results significantly degrades when testing images are from a slightly different distribution. In this work, we propose a pixel-based facial expression synthesis method. Recent work has shown that facial expression synthesis changes only local regions of faces. In the proposed method, each output pixel observes only one input pixel. The proposed method achieves generalization capability by leveraging only few hundred images. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method performs comparably with the recent GANs on in-dataset images and significantly outperforms on in the wild images. In addition, the proposed method is faster and it also achieves significantly better performance with two orders of magnitudes lesser computational and storage cost as compared to state-of-the-art GAN-based methods.

Age Gap Reducer-GAN for Recognizing Age-Separated Faces

Daksha Yadav, Naman Kohli, Mayank Vatsa, Richa Singh, Afzel Noore

Auto-TLDR; Generative Adversarial Network for Age-separated Face Recognition

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In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm for matching faces with temporal variations caused due to age progression. The proposed generative adversarial network algorithm is a unified framework which combines facial age estimation and age-separated face verification. The key idea of this approach is to learn the age variations across time by conditioning the input image on the subject's gender and the target age group to which the face needs to be progressed. The loss function accounts for reducing the age gap between the original image and generated face image as well as preserving the identity. Both visual fidelity and quantitative evaluations demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed architecture on different facial age databases for age-separated face recognition.

Self-Supervised Learning of Dynamic Representations for Static Images

Siyang Song, Enrique Sanchez, Linlin Shen, Michel Valstar

Auto-TLDR; Facial Action Unit Intensity Estimation and Affect Estimation from Still Images with Multiple Temporal Scale

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Facial actions are spatio-temporal signals by nature, and therefore their modeling is crucially dependent on the availability of temporal information. In this paper, we focus on inferring such temporal dynamics of facial actions when no explicit temporal information is available, i.e. from still images. We present a novel approach to capture multiple scales of such temporal dynamics, with an application to facial Action Unit (AU) intensity estimation and dimensional affect estimation. In particular, 1) we propose a framework that infers a dynamic representation (DR) from a still image, which captures the bi-directional flow of time within a short time-window centered at the input image; 2) we show that we can train our method without the need of explicitly generating target representations, allowing the network to represent dynamics more broadly; and 3) we propose to apply a multiple temporal scale approach that infers DRs for different window lengths (MDR) from a still image. We empirically validate the value of our approach on the task of frame ranking, and show how our proposed MDR attains state of the art results on BP4D for AU intensity estimation and on SEMAINE for dimensional affect estimation, using only still images at test time.

High Resolution Face Age Editing

Xu Yao, Gilles Puy, Alasdair Newson, Yann Gousseau, Pierre Hellier

Auto-TLDR; An Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Face Age editing on High Resolution Images

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Face age editing has become a crucial task in film post-production, and is also becoming popular for general purpose photography. Recently, adversarial training has produced some of the most visually impressive results for image manipulation, including the face aging/de-aging task. In spite of considerable progress, current methods often present visual artifacts and can only deal with low-resolution images. In order to achieve aging/de-aging with the high quality and robustness necessary for wider use, these problems need to be addressed. This is the goal of the present work. We present an encoder-decoder architecture for face age editing. The core idea of our network is to encode a face image to age-invariant features, and learn a modulation vector corresponding to a target age. We then combine these two elements to produce a realistic image of the person with the desired target age. Our architecture is greatly simplified with respect to other approaches, and allows for fine-grained age editing on high resolution images in a single unified model. Source codes are available at https://github.com/InterDigitalInc/HRFAE.

A Quantitative Evaluation Framework of Video De-Identification Methods

Sathya Bursic, Alessandro D'Amelio, Marco Granato, Giuliano Grossi, Raffaella Lanzarotti

Auto-TLDR; Face de-identification using photo-reality and facial expressions

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We live in an era of privacy concerns, motivating a large research effort in face de-identification. As in other fields, we are observing a general movement from hand-crafted methods to deep learning methods, mainly involving generative models. Although these methods produce more natural de-identified images or videos, we claim that the mere evaluation of the de-identification is not sufficient, especially when it comes to processing the images/videos further. In this note, we take into account the issue of preserving privacy, facial expressions, and photo-reality simultaneously, proposing a general testing framework. The method is applied to four open-source tools, producing a baseline for future de-identification methods.

SAT-Net: Self-Attention and Temporal Fusion for Facial Action Unit Detection

Zhihua Li, Zheng Zhang, Lijun Yin

Auto-TLDR; Temporal Fusion and Self-Attention Network for Facial Action Unit Detection

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Research on facial action unit detection has shown remarkable performances by using deep spatial learning models in recent years, however, it is far from reaching its full capacity in learning due to the lack of use of temporal information of AUs across time. Since the AU occurrence in one frame is highly likely related to previous frames in a temporal sequence, exploring temporal correlation of AUs across frames becomes a key motivation of this work. In this paper, we propose a novel temporal fusion and AU-supervised self-attention network (a so-called SAT-Net) to address the AU detection problem. First of all, we input the deep features of a sequence into a convolutional LSTM network and fuse the previous temporal information into the feature map of the last frame, and continue to learn the AU occurrence. Second, considering the AU detection problem is a multi-label classification problem that individual label depends only on certain facial areas, we propose a new self-learned attention mask by focusing the detection of each AU on parts of facial areas through the learning of individual attention mask for each AU, thus increasing the AU independence without the loss of any spatial relations. Our extensive experiments show that the proposed framework achieves better results of AU detection over the state-of-the-arts on two benchmark databases (BP4D and DISFA).

Interpretable Emotion Classification Using Temporal Convolutional Models

Manasi Bharat Gund, Abhiram Ravi Bharadwaj, Ifeoma Nwogu

Auto-TLDR; Understanding the Dynamics of Facial Emotion Expression with Spatiotemporal Representations

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As with many problems solved by deep neural networks, existing solutions rarely explain, precisely, the important factors responsible for the predictions made by the model. This work looks to investigate how different spatial regions and landmark points change in position over time, to better explain the underlying factors responsible for various facial emotion expressions. By pinpointing the specific regions or points responsible for the classification of a particular facial expression, we gain better insight into the dynamics of the face when displaying that emotion. To accomplish this, we examine two spatiotemporal representations of moving faces, while expressing different emotions. The representations are then presented to a convolutional neural network for emotion classification. Class activation maps are used in highlighting the regions of interest and the results are qualitatively compared with the well known facial action units, using the facial action coding system. The model was originally trained and tested on the CK+ dataset for emotion classification, and then generalized to the SAMM dataset. In so doing, we successfully present an interpretable technique for understanding the dynamics that occur during convolutional-based prediction tasks on sequences of face data.

Continuous Learning of Face Attribute Synthesis

Ning Xin, Shaohui Xu, Fangzhe Nan, Xiaoli Dong, Weijun Li, Yuanzhou Yao

Auto-TLDR; Continuous Learning for Face Attribute Synthesis

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The generative adversarial network (GAN) exhibits great superiority in the face attribute synthesis task. However, existing methods have very limited effects on the expansion of new attributes. To overcome the limitations of a single network in new attribute synthesis, a continuous learning method for face attribute synthesis is proposed in this work. First, the feature vector of the input image is extracted and attribute direction regression is performed in the feature space to obtain the axes of different attributes. The feature vector is then linearly guided along the axis so that images with target attributes can be synthesized by the decoder. Finally, to make the network capable of continuous learning, the orthogonal direction modification module is used to extend the newly-added attributes. Experimental results show that the proposed method can endow a single network with the ability to learn attributes continuously, and, as compared to those produced by the current state-of-the-art methods, the synthetic attributes have higher accuracy.

Teacher-Student Training and Triplet Loss for Facial Expression Recognition under Occlusion

Mariana-Iuliana Georgescu, Radu Ionescu

Auto-TLDR; Knowledge Distillation for Facial Expression Recognition under Occlusion

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In this paper, we study the task of facial expression recognition under strong occlusion. We are particularly interested in cases where 50% of the face is occluded, e.g. when the subject wears a Virtual Reality (VR) headset. While previous studies show that pre-training convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on fully-visible (non-occluded) faces improves the accuracy, we propose to employ knowledge distillation to achieve further improvements. First of all, we employ the classic teacher-student training strategy, in which the teacher is a CNN trained on fully-visible faces and the student is a CNN trained on occluded faces. Second of all, we propose a new approach for knowledge distillation based on triplet loss. During training, the goal is to reduce the distance between an anchor embedding, produced by a student CNN that takes occluded faces as input, and a positive embedding (from the same class as the anchor), produced by a teacher CNN trained on fully-visible faces, so that it becomes smaller than the distance between the anchor and a negative embedding (from a different class than the anchor), produced by the student CNN. Third of all, we propose to combine the distilled embeddings obtained through the classic teacher-student strategy and our novel teacher-student strategy based on triplet loss into a single embedding vector. We conduct experiments on two benchmarks, FER+ and AffectNet, with two CNN architectures, VGG-f and VGG-face, showing that knowledge distillation can bring significant improvements over the state-of-the-art methods designed for occluded faces in the VR setting. Furthermore, we obtain accuracy rates that are quite close to the state-of-the-art models that take as input fully-visible faces. For example, on the FER+ data set, our VGG-face based on concatenated distilled embeddings attains an accuracy rate of 82.75% on lower-half-visible faces, which is only 2.24% below the accuracy rate of a state-of-the-art VGG-13 that is evaluated on fully-visible faces. Given that our model sees only the lower-half of the face, we consider this to be a remarkable achievement. In conclusion, we consider that our distilled CNN models can provide useful feedback for the task of recognizing the facial expressions of a person wearing a VR headset.

Magnifying Spontaneous Facial Micro Expressions for Improved Recognition

Pratikshya Sharma, Sonya Coleman, Pratheepan Yogarajah, Laurence Taggart, Pradeepa Samarasinghe

Auto-TLDR; Eulerian Video Magnification for Micro Expression Recognition

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Building an effective automatic micro expression recognition (MER) system is becoming increasingly desirable in computer vision applications. However, it is also very challenging given the fine-grained nature of the expressions to be recognized. Hence, we investigate if amplifying micro facial muscle movements as a pre-processing phase, by employing Eulerian Video Magnification (EVM), can boost performance of Local Phase Quantization with Three Orthogonal Planes (LPQ-TOP) to achieve improved facial MER across various datasets. In addition, we examine the rate of increase for recognition to determine if it is uniform across datasets using EVM. Ultimately, we classify the extracted features using Support Vector Machines (SVM). We evaluate and compare the performance with various methods on seven different datasets namely CASME, CAS(ME)2, CASME2, SMIC-HS, SMIC-VIS, SMIC-NIR and SAMM. The results obtained demonstrate that EVM can enhance LPQ-TOP to achieve improved recognition accuracy on the majority of the datasets.

Controllable Face Aging

Haien Zeng, Hanjiang Lai

Auto-TLDR; A controllable face aging method via attribute disentanglement generative adversarial network

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Motivated by the following two observations: 1) people are aging differently under different conditions for changeable facial attributes, e.g., skin color may become darker when working outside, and 2) it needs to keep some unchanged facial attributes during the aging process, e.g., race and gender, we propose a controllable face aging method via attribute disentanglement generative adversarial network. To offer fine control over the synthesized face images, first, an individual embedding of the face is directly learned from an image that contains the desired facial attribute. Second, since the image may contain other unwanted attributes, an attribute disentanglement network is used to separate the individual embedding and learn the common embedding that contains information about the face attribute (e.g., race). With the common embedding, we can manipulate the generated face image with the desired attribute in an explicit manner. Experimental results on two common benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed generator achieves comparable performance on the aging effect with state-of-the-art baselines while gaining more flexibility for attribute control. Code is available at supplementary material.

Depth Videos for the Classification of Micro-Expressions

Ankith Jain Rakesh Kumar, Bir Bhanu, Christopher Casey, Sierra Cheung, Aaron Seitz

Auto-TLDR; RGB-D Dataset for the Classification of Facial Micro-expressions

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Facial micro-expressions are spontaneous, subtle, involuntary muscle movements occurring briefly on the face. The spotting and recognition of these expressions are difficult due to the subtle behavior, and the time duration of these expressions is about half a second, which makes it difficult for humans to identify them. These micro-expressions have many applications in our daily life, such as in the field of online learning, game playing, lie detection, and therapy sessions. Traditionally, researchers use RGB images/videos to spot and classify these micro-expressions, which pose challenging problems, such as illumination, privacy concerns and pose variation. The use of depth videos solves these issues to some extent, as the depth videos are not susceptible to the variation in illumination. This paper describes the collection of a first RGB-D dataset for the classification of facial micro-expressions into 6 universal expressions: Anger, Happy, Sad, Fear, Disgust, and Surprise. This paper shows the comparison between the RGB and Depth videos for the classification of facial micro-expressions. Further, a comparison of results shows that depth videos alone can be used to classify facial micro-expressions correctly in a decision tree structure by using the traditional and deep learning approaches with good classification accuracy. The dataset will be released to the public in the near future.

Coherence and Identity Learning for Arbitrary-Length Face Video Generation

Shuquan Ye, Chu Han, Jiaying Lin, Guoqiang Han, Shengfeng He

Auto-TLDR; Face Video Synthesis Using Identity-Aware GAN and Face Coherence Network

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Face synthesis is an interesting yet challenging task in computer vision. It is even much harder to generate a portrait video than a single image. In this paper, we propose a novel video generation framework for synthesizing arbitrary-length face videos without any face exemplar or landmark. To overcome the synthesis ambiguity of face video, we propose a divide-and-conquer strategy to separately address the video face synthesis problem from two aspects, face identity synthesis and rearrangement. To this end, we design a cascaded network which contains three components, Identity-aware GAN (IA-GAN), Face Coherence Network, and Interpolation Network. IA-GAN is proposed to synthesize photorealistic faces with the same identity from a set of noises. Face Coherence Network is designed to re-arrange the faces generated by IA-GAN while keeping the inter-frame coherence. Interpolation Network is introduced to eliminate the discontinuity between two adjacent frames and improve the smoothness of the face video. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed network is able to generate face video with high visual quality while preserving the identity. Statistics show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art unconditional face video generative models in multiple challenging datasets.

Two-Stream Temporal Convolutional Network for Dynamic Facial Attractiveness Prediction

Nina Weng, Jiahao Wang, Annan Li, Yunhong Wang

Auto-TLDR; 2S-TCN: A Two-Stream Temporal Convolutional Network for Dynamic Facial Attractiveness Prediction

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In the field of facial attractiveness prediction, while deep models using static pictures have shown promising results, little attention is paid to dynamic facial information, which is proven to be influential by psychological studies. Meanwhile, the increasing popularity of short video apps creates an enormous demand of facial attractiveness prediction from short video clips. In this paper, we target on the dynamic facial attractiveness prediction problem. To begin with, a large-scale video-based facial attractiveness prediction dataset (VFAP) with more than one thousand clips from TikTok is collected. A two-stream temporal convolutional network (2S-TCN) is then proposed to capture dynamic attractiveness feature from both facial appearance and landmarks. We employ attentive feature enhancement along with specially designed modality and temporal fusion strategies to better explore the temporal dynamics. Extensive experiments on the proposed VFAP dataset demonstrate that 2S-TCN has a distinct advantage over the state-of-the-art static prediction methods.

Hybrid Approach for 3D Head Reconstruction: Using Neural Networks and Visual Geometry

Oussema Bouafif, Bogdan Khomutenko, Mohammed Daoudi

Auto-TLDR; Recovering 3D Head Geometry from a Single Image using Deep Learning and Geometric Techniques

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Recovering the 3D geometric structure of a face from a single input image is a challenging active research area in computer vision. In this paper, we present a novel method for reconstructing 3D heads from a single or multiple image(s) using a hybrid approach based on deep learning and geometric techniques. We propose an encoder-decoder network based on the U-net architecture and trained on synthetic data only. It predicts both pixel-wise normal vectors and landmarks maps from a single input photo. Landmarks are used for the pose computation and the initialization of the optimization problem, which, in turn, reconstructs the 3D head geometry by using a parametric morphable model and normal vector fields. State-of-the-art results are achieved through qualitative and quantitative evaluation tests on both single and multi-view settings. Despite the fact that the model was trained only on synthetic data, it successfully recovers 3D geometry and precise poses for real-world images.

Automatic Annotation of Corpora for Emotion Recognition through Facial Expressions Analysis

Alex Mircoli, Claudia Diamantini, Domenico Potena, Emanuele Storti

Auto-TLDR; Automatic annotation of video subtitles on the basis of facial expressions using machine learning algorithms

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The recent diffusion of social networks has made available an unprecedented amount of user-generated content, which may be analyzed in order to determine people's opinions and emotions about a large variety of topics. Research has made many efforts in defining accurate algorithms for analyzing emotions expressed by users in texts; however, their performance often rely on the existence of large annotated datasets, whose current scarcity represents a major issue. The manual creation of such datasets represents a costly and time-consuming activity and hence there is an increasing demand for techniques for the automatic annotation of corpora. In this work we present a methodology for the automatic annotation of video subtitles on the basis of the analysis of facial expressions of people in videos, with the goal of creating annotated corpora that may be used to train emotion recognition algorithms. Facial expressions are analyzed through machine learning algorithms, on the basis of a set of manually-engineered facial features that are extracted from video frames. The soundness of the proposed methodology has been evaluated through an extensive experimentation aimed at determining the performance on real datasets of each methodological step.

DFH-GAN: A Deep Face Hashing with Generative Adversarial Network

Bo Xiao, Lanxiang Zhou, Yifei Wang, Qiangfang Xu

Auto-TLDR; Deep Face Hashing with GAN for Face Image Retrieval

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Face Image retrieval is one of the key research directions in computer vision field. Thanks to the rapid development of deep neural network in recent years, deep hashing has achieved good performance in the field of image retrieval. But for large-scale face image retrieval, the performance needs to be further improved. In this paper, we propose Deep Face Hashing with GAN (DFH-GAN), a novel deep hashing method for face image retrieval, which mainly consists of three components: a generator network for generating synthesized images, a discriminator network with a shared CNN to learn multi-domain face feature, and a hash encoding network to generate compact binary hash codes. The generator network is used to perform data augmentation so that the model could learn from both real images and diverse synthesized images. We adopt a two-stage training strategy. In the first stage, the GAN is trained to generate fake images, while in the second stage, to make the network convergence faster. The model inherits the trained shared CNN of discriminator to train the DFH model by using many different supervised loss functions not only in the last layer but also in the middle layer of the network. Extensive experiments on two widely used datasets demonstrate that DFH-GAN can generate high-quality binary hash codes and exceed the performance of the state-of-the-art model greatly.

Identity-Preserved Face Beauty Transformation with Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks

Zhitong Huang, Ching Y Suen

Auto-TLDR; Identity-preserved face beauty transformation using conditional GANs

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Identity-preserved face beauty transformation aims to change the beauty scale of a face image while preserving the identity of the original face. In our framework of conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (cGANs), the synthesized face produced by the generator would have the same beauty scale indicated by the input condition. Unlike the discrete class labels used in most cGANs, the condition of target beauty scale in our framework is given by a continuous real-valued beauty score in the range [1 to 5], which makes the work challenging. To tackle the problem, we have implemented a triple structure, in which the conditional discriminator is divided into a normal discriminator and a separate face beauty predictor. We have also developed another new structure called Conditioned Instance Normalization to replace the original concatenation used in cGANs, which makes the combination of the input image and condition more effective. Furthermore, Self-Consistency Loss is introduced as a new parameter to improve the stability of training and quality of the generated image. In the end, the objectives of beauty transformation and identity preservation are evaluated by the pretrained face beauty predictor and state-of-the-art face recognition network. The result is encouraging and it also shows that certain facial features could be synthesized by the generator according to the target beauty scale, while preserving the original identity.

Super-Resolution Guided Pore Detection for Fingerprint Recognition

Syeda Nyma Ferdous, Ali Dabouei, Jeremy Dawson, Nasser M. Nasarabadi

Auto-TLDR; Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Network for Fingerprint Recognition Using Pore Features

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Performance of fingerprint recognition algorithms substantially rely on fine features extracted from fingerprints. Apart from minutiae and ridge patterns, pore features have proven to be usable for fingerprint recognition. Although features from minutiae and ridge patterns are quite attainable from low-resolution images, using pore features is practical only if the fingerprint image is of high resolution which necessitates a model that enhances the image quality of the conventional 500 ppi legacy fingerprints preserving the fine details. To find a solution for recovering pore information from low-resolution fingerprints, we adopt a joint learning-based approach that combines both super-resolution and pore detection networks. Our modified single image Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Network (SRGAN) framework helps to reliably reconstruct high-resolution fingerprint samples from low-resolution ones assisting the pore detection network to identify pores with a high accuracy. The network jointly learns a distinctive feature representation from a real low-resolution fingerprint sample and successfully synthesizes a high-resolution sample from it. To add discriminative information and uniqueness for all the subjects, we have integrated features extracted from a deep fingerprint verifier with the SRGAN quality discriminator. We also add ridge reconstruction loss, utilizing ridge patterns to make the best use of extracted features. Our proposed method solves the recognition problem by improving the quality of fingerprint images. High recognition accuracy of the synthesized samples that is close to the accuracy achieved using the original high-resolution images validate the effectiveness of our proposed model.

A Prototype-Based Generalized Zero-Shot Learning Framework for Hand Gesture Recognition

Jinting Wu, Yujia Zhang, Xiao-Guang Zhao

Auto-TLDR; Generalized Zero-Shot Learning for Hand Gesture Recognition

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Hand gesture recognition plays a significant role in human-computer interaction for understanding various human gestures and their intent. However, most prior works can only recognize gestures of limited labeled classes and fail to adapt to new categories. The task of Generalized Zero-Shot Learning (GZSL) for hand gesture recognition aims to address the above issue by leveraging semantic representations and detecting both seen and unseen class samples. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end prototype-based GZSL framework for hand gesture recognition which consists of two branches. The first branch is a prototype-based detector that learns gesture representations and determines whether an input sample belongs to a seen or unseen category. The second branch is a zero-shot label predictor which takes the features of unseen classes as input and outputs predictions through a learned mapping mechanism between the feature and the semantic space. We further establish a hand gesture dataset that specifically targets this GZSL task, and comprehensive experiments on this dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach on recognizingQuestionnaire both seen and unseen gestures.

MRP-Net: A Light Multiple Region Perception Neural Network for Multi-Label AU Detection

Yang Tang, Shuang Chen, Honggang Zhang, Gang Wang, Rui Yang

Auto-TLDR; MRP-Net: A Fast and Light Neural Network for Facial Action Unit Detection

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Facial Action Units (AUs) are of great significance in communication. Automatic AU detection can improve the understanding of psychological condition and emotional status. Recently, a number of deep learning methods have been proposed to take charge with problems in automatic AU detection. Several challenges, like unbalanced labels and ignorance of local information, remain to be addressed. In this paper, we propose a fast and light neural network called MRP-Net, which is an end-to-end trainable method for facial AU detection to solve these problems. First, we design a Multiple Region Perception (MRP) module aimed at capturing different locations and sizes of features in the deeper level of the network without facial landmark points. Then, in order to balance the positive and negative samples in the large dataset, a batch balanced method adjusting the weight of every sample in one batch in our loss function is suggested. Experimental results on two popular AU datasets, BP4D and DISFA prove that MRP-Net outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Compared with the best method, not only does MRP-Net have an average F1 score improvement of 2.95% on BP4D and 5.43% on DISFA, and it also decreases the number of network parameters by 54.62% and the number of network FLOPs by 19.6%.

Local Facial Attribute Transfer through Inpainting

Ricard Durall, Franz-Josef Pfreundt, Janis Keuper

Auto-TLDR; Attribute Transfer Inpainting Generative Adversarial Network

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The term attribute transfer refers to the tasks of altering images in such a way, that the semantic interpretation of a given input image is shifted towards an intended direction, which is quantified by semantic attributes. Prominent example applications are photo realistic changes of facial features and expressions, like changing the hair color, adding a smile, enlarging the nose or altering the entire context of a scene, like transforming a summer landscape into a winter panorama. Recent advances in attribute transfer are mostly based on generative deep neural networks, using various techniques to manipulate images in the latent space of the generator. In this paper, we present a novel method for the common sub-task of local attribute transfers, where only parts of a face have to be altered in order to achieve semantic changes (e.g. removing a mustache). In contrast to previous methods, where such local changes have been implemented by generating new (global) images, we propose to formulate local attribute transfers as an inpainting problem. Removing and regenerating only parts of images, our Attribute Transfer Inpainting Generative Adversarial Network (ATI-GAN) is able to utilize local context information to focus on the attributes while keeping the background unmodified resulting in visually sound results.

Multi-Laplacian GAN with Edge Enhancement for Face Super Resolution

Shanlei Ko, Bi-Ru Dai

Auto-TLDR; Face Image Super-Resolution with Enhanced Edge Information

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Face image super-resolution has become a research hotspot in the field of image processing. Nowadays, more and more researches add additional information, such as landmark, identity, to reconstruct high resolution images from low resolution ones, and have a good performance in quantitative terms and perceptual quality. However, these additional information is hard to obtain in many cases. In this work, we focus on reconstructing face images by extracting useful information from face images directly rather than using additional information. By observing edge information in each scale of face images, we propose a method to reconstruct high resolution face images with enhanced edge information. In additional, with the proposed training procedure, our method reconstructs photo-realistic images in upscaling factor 8x and outperforms state-of-the-art methods both in quantitative terms and perceptual quality.

Responsive Social Smile: A Machine-Learning Based Multimodal Behavior Assessment Framework towards Early Stage Autism Screening

Yueran Pan, Kunjing Cai, Ming Cheng, Xiaobing Zou, Ming Li

Auto-TLDR; Responsive Social Smile: A Machine Learningbased Assessment Framework for Early ASD Screening

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Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder, which causes social deﬁcits in social lives. Early ASD screening for children is an important method to reduce the impact of ASD on people’s whole lives. Traditional screening methods rely on protocol experiments and subjective evaluations from clinicians and domain experts and thereby cost a lot. To standardize the process of ASD screening, we 1 collaborate with a group of ASD experts, and design a ”Responsive Social Smile” protocol and an experiment environment. Also, we propose a machine learningbased assessment framework for early ASD screening. By integrating technologies of speech recognition and computer vision, the framework can quantitatively analyze the behaviors of children under well-designed protocols. By collecting 196 test samples from 41 children in the clinical treatments, our proposed method obtains 85.20% accuracy for the score prediction of individual protocol, and 80.49% unweighted accuracy for the ﬁnal ASD prediction. This result indicates that our model reaches the average level of domain experts in ASD diagnosis.

Learning Interpretable Representation for 3D Point Clouds

Feng-Guang Su, Ci-Siang Lin, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang

Auto-TLDR; Disentangling Body-type and Pose Information from 3D Point Clouds Using Adversarial Learning

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Point clouds have emerged as a popular representation of 3D visual data. With a set of unordered 3D points, one typically needs to transform them into latent representation before further classification and segmentation tasks. However, one cannot easily interpret such encoded latent representation. To address this issue, we propose a unique deep learning framework for disentangling body-type and pose information from 3D point clouds. Extending from autoenoder, we advance adversarial learning a selected feature type, while classification and data recovery can be additionally observed. Our experiments confirm that our model can be successfully applied to perform a wide range of 3D applications like shape synthesis, action translation, shape/action interpolation, and synchronization.

Two-Level Attention-Based Fusion Learning for RGB-D Face Recognition

Hardik Uppal, Alireza Sepas-Moghaddam, Michael Greenspan, Ali Etemad

Auto-TLDR; Fused RGB-D Facial Recognition using Attention-Aware Feature Fusion

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With recent advances in RGB-D sensing technologies as well as improvements in machine learning and fusion techniques, RGB-D facial recognition has become an active area of research. A novel attention aware method is proposed to fuse two image modalities, RGB and depth, for enhanced RGB-D facial recognition. The proposed method first extracts features from both modalities using a convolutional feature extractor. These features are then fused using a two layer attention mechanism. The first layer focuses on the fused feature maps generated by the feature extractor, exploiting the relationship between feature maps using LSTM recurrent learning. The second layer focuses on the spatial features of those maps using convolution. The training database is preprocessed and augmented through a set of geometric transformations, and the learning process is further aided using transfer learning from a pure 2D RGB image training process. Comparative evaluations demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches, including both traditional and deep neural network-based methods, on the challenging CurtinFaces and IIIT-D RGB-D benchmark databases, achieving classification accuracies over 98.2% and 99.3% respectively. The proposed attention mechanism is also compared with other attention mechanisms, demonstrating more accurate results.

DAIL: Dataset-Aware and Invariant Learning for Face Recognition

Gaoang Wang, Chen Lin, Tianqiang Liu, Mingwei He, Jiebo Luo

Auto-TLDR; DAIL: Dataset-Aware and Invariant Learning for Face Recognition

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To achieve good performance in face recognition, a large scale training dataset is usually required. A simple yet effective way for improving the recognition performance is to use a dataset as large as possible by combining multiple datasets in the training. However, it is problematic and troublesome to naively combine different datasets due to two major issues. Firstly, the same person can possibly appear in different datasets, leading to the identity overlapping issue between different datasets. Natively treating the same person as different classes in different datasets during training will affect back-propagation and generate non-representative embeddings. On the other hand, manually cleaning labels will take a lot of human efforts, especially when there are millions of images and thousands of identities. Secondly, different datasets are collected in different situations and thus will lead to different domain distributions. Natively combining datasets will lead to domain distribution differences and make it difficult to learn domain invariant embeddings across different datasets. In this paper, we propose DAIL: Dataset-Aware and Invariant Learning to resolve the above-mentioned issues. To solve the first issue of identity overlapping, we propose a dataset-aware loss for multi-dataset training by reducing the penalty when the same person appears in multiple datasets. This can be readily achieved with a modified softmax loss with a dataset-aware term. To solve the second issue, the domain adaptation with gradient reversal layers is employed for dataset invariant learning. The proposed approach not only achieves state-of-the-art results on several commonly used face recognition validation sets, like LFW, CFP-FP, AgeDB-30, but also shows great benefit for practical usage.

Pose-Robust Face Recognition by Deep Meta Capsule Network-Based Equivariant Embedding

Fangyu Wu, Jeremy Simon Smith, Wenjin Lu, Bailing Zhang

Auto-TLDR; Deep Meta Capsule Network-based Equivariant Embedding Model for Pose-Robust Face Recognition

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Despite the exceptional success in face recognition related technologies, handling large pose variations still remains a key challenge. Current techniques for pose-robust face recognition either, directly extract pose-invariant features, or first synthesize a face that matches the target pose before feature extraction. It is more desirable to learn face representations equivariant to pose variations. To this end, this paper proposes a deep meta Capsule network-based Equivariant Embedding Model (DM-CEEM) with three distinct novelties. First, the proposed RB-CapsNet allows DM-CEEM to learn an equivariant embedding for pose variations and achieve the desired transformation for input face images. Second, we introduce a new version of a Capsule network called RB-CapsNet to extend CapsNet to perform a profile-to-frontal face transformation in deep feature space. Third, we train the DM-CEEM in a meta way by treating a single overall classification target as multiple sub-tasks that satisfy certain unknown probabilities. In each sub-task, we sample the support and query sets randomly. The experimental results on both controlled and in-the-wild databases demonstrate the superiority of DM-CEEM over state-of-the-art.

Identifying Missing Children: Face Age-Progression Via Deep Feature Aging

Debayan Deb, Divyansh Aggarwal, Anil Jain

Auto-TLDR; Aging Face Features for Missing Children Identification

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Given a face image of a recovered child at probe-age, we search a gallery of missing children with known identities and gallery-ages at which they were either lost or stolen in an attempt to unite the recovered child with his family. We propose a feature aging module that can age-progress deep face features output by a face matcher to improve the recognition accuracy of age-separated child face images. In addition, the feature aging module guides age-progression in the image space such that synthesized aged gallery faces can be utilized to further enhance cross-age face matching accuracy of any commodity face matcher. For time lapses larger than 10 years (the missing child is recovered after 10 or more years), the proposed age-progression module improves the closed-set identification accuracy of CosFace from 60.72% to 66.12% on a child celebrity dataset, namely ITWCC. The proposed method also outperforms state-of-the-art approaches with a rank-1 identification rate of 95.91%, compared to 94.91%, on a public aging dataset, FG-NET, and 99.58%, compared to 99.50%, on CACD-VS. These results suggest that aging face features enhances the ability to identify young children who are possible victims of child trafficking or abduction.

Quality-Based Representation for Unconstrained Face Recognition

Nelson Méndez-Llanes, Katy Castillo-Rosado, Heydi Mendez-Vazquez, Massimo Tistarelli

Auto-TLDR; activation map for face recognition in unconstrained environments

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Significant advances have been achieved in face recognition in the last decade thanks to the development of deep learning methods. However, recognizing faces captured in uncontrolled environments is still a challenging problem for the scientific community. In these scenarios, the performance of most of existing deep learning based methods abruptly falls, due to the bad quality of the face images. In this work, we propose to use an activation map to represent the quality information in a face image. Different face regions are analyzed to determine their quality and then only those regions with good quality are used to perform the recognition using a given deep face model. For experimental evaluation, in order to simulate unconstrained environments, three challenging databases, with different variations in appearance, were selected: the Labeled Faces in the Wild Database, the Celebrities in Frontal-Profile in the Wild Database, and the AR Database. Three deep face models were used to evaluate the proposal on these databases and in all cases, the use of the proposed activation map allows the improvement of the recognition rates obtained by the original models in a range from 0.3 up to 31%. The obtained results experimentally demonstrated that the proposal is able to select those face areas with higher discriminative power and enough identifying information, while ignores the ones with spurious information.

Enlarging Discriminative Power by Adding an Extra Class in Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Hai Tran, Sumyeong Ahn, Taeyoung Lee, Yung Yi

Auto-TLDR; Unsupervised Domain Adaptation using Artificial Classes

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We study the problem of unsupervised domain adaptation that aims at obtaining a prediction model for the target domain using labeled data from the source domain and unlabeled data from the target domain. There exists an array of recent research based on the idea of extracting features that are not only invariant for both domains but also provide high discriminative power for the target domain. In this paper, we propose an idea of improving the discriminativeness: Adding an extra artificial class and training the model on the given data together with the GAN-generated samples of the new class. The trained model based on the new class samples is capable of extracting the features that are more discriminative by repositioning data of current classes in the target domain and therefore increasing the distances among the target clusters in the feature space. Our idea is highly generic so that it is compatible with many existing methods such as DANN, VADA, and DIRT-T. We conduct various experiments for the standard data commonly used for the evaluation of unsupervised domain adaptations and demonstrate that our algorithm achieves the SOTA performance for many scenarios.

Siamese-Structure Deep Neural Network Recognizing Changes in Facial Expression According to the Degree of Smiling

Kazuaki Kondo, Taichi Nakamura, Yuichi Nakamura, Shin'Ichi Satoh

Auto-TLDR; A Siamese-Structure Deep Neural Network for Happiness Recognition

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A smile is a representative expression of happiness or high quality-of-life; however, automatic recognition of a smile according to happiness remains a challenging task. Because expressions of happiness are strongly dependent upon physical condition and occurrence of other emotions, and similar facial expression often occur under different emotions, we consider that there is no absolute visual pattern of a smile corresponding to happiness. Therefore, in this study, we assumed that a ``smile with happiness'' is observed as the temporal ascent in the degree of smiling and attempted to recognize this by capturing changes in facial expression within temporally sequential images. As an implementation of this scheme, we proposed a Siamese-structure deep neural network to compare facial expressions in two input images and estimate the existence of smile ascension or descension. For primal analysis of the proposed network, we developed a unique smiling dataset containing image pairs with various changes in smiling degree, including slight changes. The results demonstrated that the proposed method achieved nearly perfect recognition with >0.95 accuracy when recognizing changes in the degree of smiling that humans certainly recognize. Attention regions that contributed to the predicted labels were concentrated on the mouth, cheeks, and tail of the eyes, which indicates a reasonable function for recognizing changes in smiling degree was constructed by the proposed method.

Makeup Style Transfer on Low-Quality Images with Weighted Multi-Scale Attention

Daniel Organisciak, Edmond S. L. Ho, Shum Hubert P. H.

Auto-TLDR; Facial Makeup Style Transfer for Low-Resolution Images Using Multi-Scale Spatial Attention

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Facial makeup style transfer is an extremely challenging sub-field of image-to-image-translation. Due to this difficulty, state-of-the-art results are mostly reliant on the Face Parsing Algorithm, which segments a face into parts in order to easily extract makeup features. However, we find that this algorithm can only work well on high-definition images where facial features can be accurately extracted. Faces in many real-world photos, such as those including a large background or multiple people, are typically of low-resolution, which considerably hinders state-of-the-art algorithms. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end holistic approach to effectively transfer makeup styles between two low-resolution images. The idea is built upon a novel weighted multi-scale spatial attention module, which identifies salient pixel regions on low-resolution images in multiple scales, and uses channel attention to determine the most effective attention map. This design provides two benefits: low-resolution images are usually blurry to different extents, so a multi-scale architecture can select the most effective convolution kernel size to implement spatial attention; makeup is applied on both a macro-level (foundation, fake tan) and a micro-level (eyeliner, lipstick) so different scales can excel in extracting different makeup features. We develop an Augmented CycleGAN network that embeds our attention modules at selected layers to most effectively transfer makeup. We test our system with the FBD data set, which consists of many low-resolution facial images, and demonstrates that it outperforms state-of-the-art methods, particularly in transferring makeup for blurry images and partially occluded images.

Free-Form Image Inpainting Via Contrastive Attention Network

Xin Ma, Xiaoqiang Zhou, Huaibo Huang, Zhenhua Chai, Xiaolin Wei, Ran He

Auto-TLDR; Self-supervised Siamese inference for image inpainting

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Most deep learning based image inpainting approaches adopt autoencoder or its variants to fill missing regions in images. Encoders are usually utilized to learn powerful representational spaces, which are important for dealing with sophisticated learning tasks. Specifically, in the image inpainting task, masks with any shapes can appear anywhere in images (i.e., free-form masks) forming complex patterns. It is difficult for encoders to capture such powerful representations under this complex situation. To tackle this problem, we propose a self-supervised Siamese inference network to improve the robustness and generalization. Moreover, the restored image usually can not be harmoniously integrated into the exiting content, especially in the boundary area. To address this problem, we propose a novel Dual Attention Fusion module (DAF), which can combine both the restored and known regions in a smoother way and be inserted into decoder layers in a plug-and-play way. DAF is developed to not only adaptively rescale channel-wise features by taking interdependencies between channels into account but also force deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) focusing more on unknown regions. In this way, the unknown region will be naturally filled from the outside to the inside. Qualitative and quantitative experiments on multiple datasets, including facial and natural datasets (i.e., Celeb-HQ, Pairs Street View, Places2 and ImageNet), demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms against state-of-the-arts in generating high-quality inpainting results.