2,871 research outputs found
Learning based automatic face annotation for arbitrary poses and expressions from frontal images only
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 annotating unseen images, including images of different facial expressions, at any random pose within the maximum range spanned by the virtually reconstructed images. The approach is experimentally validated by automatically annotating face images from three different databases
Synthesizing Normalized Faces from Facial Identity Features
We present a method for synthesizing a frontal, neutral-expression image of a
person's face given an input face photograph. This is achieved by learning to
generate facial landmarks and textures from features extracted from a
facial-recognition network. Unlike previous approaches, our encoding feature
vector is largely invariant to lighting, pose, and facial expression.
Exploiting this invariance, we train our decoder network using only frontal,
neutral-expression photographs. Since these photographs are well aligned, we
can decompose them into a sparse set of landmark points and aligned texture
maps. The decoder then predicts landmarks and textures independently and
combines them using a differentiable image warping operation. The resulting
images can be used for a number of applications, such as analyzing facial
attributes, exposure and white balance adjustment, or creating a 3-D avatar
Fully Automatic Expression-Invariant Face Correspondence
We consider the problem of computing accurate point-to-point correspondences
among a set of human face scans with varying expressions. Our fully automatic
approach does not require any manually placed markers on the scan. Instead, the
approach learns the locations of a set of landmarks present in a database and
uses this knowledge to automatically predict the locations of these landmarks
on a newly available scan. The predicted landmarks are then used to compute
point-to-point correspondences between a template model and the newly available
scan. To accurately fit the expression of the template to the expression of the
scan, we use as template a blendshape model. Our algorithm was tested on a
database of human faces of different ethnic groups with strongly varying
expressions. Experimental results show that the obtained point-to-point
correspondence is both highly accurate and consistent for most of the tested 3D
face models
Improving Facial Analysis and Performance Driven Animation through Disentangling Identity and Expression
We present techniques for improving performance driven facial animation,
emotion recognition, and facial key-point or landmark prediction using learned
identity invariant representations. Established approaches to these problems
can work well if sufficient examples and labels for a particular identity are
available and factors of variation are highly controlled. However, labeled
examples of facial expressions, emotions and key-points for new individuals are
difficult and costly to obtain. In this paper we improve the ability of
techniques to generalize to new and unseen individuals by explicitly modeling
previously seen variations related to identity and expression. We use a
weakly-supervised approach in which identity labels are used to learn the
different factors of variation linked to identity separately from factors
related to expression. We show how probabilistic modeling of these sources of
variation allows one to learn identity-invariant representations for
expressions which can then be used to identity-normalize various procedures for
facial expression analysis and animation control. We also show how to extend
the widely used techniques of active appearance models and constrained local
models through replacing the underlying point distribution models which are
typically constructed using principal component analysis with
identity-expression factorized representations. We present a wide variety of
experiments in which we consistently improve performance on emotion
recognition, markerless performance-driven facial animation and facial
key-point tracking.Comment: to appear in Image and Vision Computing Journal (IMAVIS
A 3D Face Modelling Approach for Pose-Invariant Face Recognition in a Human-Robot Environment
Face analysis techniques have become a crucial component of human-machine
interaction in the fields of assistive and humanoid robotics. However, the
variations in head-pose that arise naturally in these environments are still a
great challenge. In this paper, we present a real-time capable 3D face
modelling framework for 2D in-the-wild images that is applicable for robotics.
The fitting of the 3D Morphable Model is based exclusively on automatically
detected landmarks. After fitting, the face can be corrected in pose and
transformed back to a frontal 2D representation that is more suitable for face
recognition. We conduct face recognition experiments with non-frontal images
from the MUCT database and uncontrolled, in the wild images from the PaSC
database, the most challenging face recognition database to date, showing an
improved performance. Finally, we present our SCITOS G5 robot system, which
incorporates our framework as a means of image pre-processing for face
analysis
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