Domain-Specific Face Synthesis for Video Face Recognition from a Single Sample Per Person

The performance of still-to-video FR systems can decline significantly because faces captured in unconstrained operational domain (OD) over multiple video cameras have a different underlying data distribution compared to faces captured under controlled conditions in the enrollment domain (ED) with a still camera. This is particularly true when individuals are enrolled to the system using a single reference still. To improve the robustness of these systems, it is possible to augment the reference set by generating synthetic faces based on the original still. However, without knowledge of the OD, many synthetic images must be generated to account for all possible capture conditions. FR systems may, therefore, require complex implementations and yield lower accuracy when training on many less relevant images. This paper introduces an algorithm for domain-specific face synthesis (DSFS) that exploits the representative intra-class variation information available from the OD. Prior to operation, a compact set of faces from unknown persons appearing in the OD is selected through clustering in the captured condition space. The domain-specific variations of these face images are projected onto the reference stills by integrating an image-based face relighting technique inside the 3D reconstruction framework. A compact set of synthetic faces is generated that resemble individuals of interest under the capture conditions relevant to the OD. In a particular implementation based on sparse representation classification, the synthetic faces generated with the DSFS are employed to form a cross-domain dictionary that account for structured sparsity. Experimental results reveal that augmenting the reference gallery set of FR systems using the proposed DSFS approach can provide a higher level of accuracy compared to state-of-the-art approaches, with only a moderate increase in its computational complexity

Face analysis and deepfake detection

This thesis concerns deep-learning-based face-related research topics. We explore how to improve the performance of several face systems when confronting challenging variations. In Chapter 1, we provide an introduction and background information on the theme, and we list the main research questions of this dissertation. In Chapter 2, we provide a synthetic face data generator with fully controlled variations and proposed a detailed experimental comparison of main characteristics that influence face detection performance. The result shows that our synthetic dataset could complement face detectors to become more robust against specific features in the real world. Our analysis also reveals that a variety of data augmentation is necessary to address differences in performance. In Chapter 3, we propose an age estimation method for handling large pose variations for unconstrained face images. A Wasserstein-based GAN model is used to complete the full uv texture presentation. The proposed AgeGAN method simultaneously learns to capture the facial uv texture map and age characteristics.In Chapter 4, we propose a maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) based cross-domain face forgery detection. The center and triplet losses are also incorporated to ensure that the learned features are shared by multiple domains and provide better generalization abilities to unseen deep fake samples. In Chapter 5, we introduce an end-to-end framework to predict ages from face videos. Clustering based transfer learning is used to provide proper prediction for imbalanced datasets

Adaptive 3D facial action intensity estimation and emotion recognition

Automatic recognition of facial emotion has been widely studied for various computer vision tasks (e.g. health monitoring, driver state surveillance and personalized learning). Most existing facial emotion recognition systems, however, either have not fully considered subject-independent dynamic features or were limited to 2D models, thus are not robust enough for real-life recognition tasks with subject variation, head movement and illumination change. Moreover, there is also lack of systematic research on effective newly arrived novel emotion class detection. To address these challenges, we present a real-time 3D facial Action Unit (AU) intensity estimation and emotion recognition system. It automatically selects 16 motion-based facial feature sets using minimal-redundancy–maximal-relevance criterion based optimization and estimates the intensities of 16 diagnostic AUs using feedforward Neural Networks and Support Vector Regressors. We also propose a set of six novel adaptive ensemble classifiers for robust classification of the six basic emotions and the detection of newly arrived unseen novel emotion classes (emotions that are not included in the training set). A distance-based clustering and uncertainty measures of the base classifiers within each ensemble model are used to inform the novel class detection. Evaluated with the Bosphorus 3D database, the system has achieved the best performance of 0.071 overall Mean Squared Error (MSE) for AU intensity estimation using Support Vector Regressors, and 92.2% average accuracy for the recognition of the six basic emotions using the proposed ensemble classifiers. In comparison with other related work, our research outperforms other state-of-the-art research on 3D facial emotion recognition for the Bosphorus database. Moreover, in on-line real-time evaluation with real human subjects, the proposed system also shows superior real-time performance with 84% recognition accuracy and great flexibility and adaptation for newly arrived novel (e.g. ‘contempt’ which is not included in the six basic emotions) emotion detection

A Comprehensive Performance Evaluation of Deformable Face Tracking "In-the-Wild"

Recently, technologies such as face detection, facial landmark localisation and face recognition and verification have matured enough to provide effective and efficient solutions for imagery captured under arbitrary conditions (referred to as "in-the-wild"). This is partially attributed to the fact that comprehensive "in-the-wild" benchmarks have been developed for face detection, landmark localisation and recognition/verification. A very important technology that has not been thoroughly evaluated yet is deformable face tracking "in-the-wild". Until now, the performance has mainly been assessed qualitatively by visually assessing the result of a deformable face tracking technology on short videos. In this paper, we perform the first, to the best of our knowledge, thorough evaluation of state-of-the-art deformable face tracking pipelines using the recently introduced 300VW benchmark. We evaluate many different architectures focusing mainly on the task of on-line deformable face tracking. In particular, we compare the following general strategies: (a) generic face detection plus generic facial landmark localisation, (b) generic model free tracking plus generic facial landmark localisation, as well as (c) hybrid approaches using state-of-the-art face detection, model free tracking and facial landmark localisation technologies. Our evaluation reveals future avenues for further research on the topic.Comment: E. Antonakos and P. Snape contributed equally and have joint second authorshi