Face Aging Effect Simulation using Hidden Factor Analysis Joint Sparse Representation

Face aging simulation has received rising investigations nowadays, whereas it still remains a challenge to generate convincing and natural age-progressed face images. In this paper, we present a novel approach to such an issue by using hidden factor analysis joint sparse representation. In contrast to the majority of tasks in the literature that handle the facial texture integrally, the proposed aging approach separately models the person-specific facial properties that tend to be stable in a relatively long period and the age-specific clues that change gradually over time. It then merely transforms the age component to a target age group via sparse reconstruction, yielding aging effects, which is finally combined with the identity component to achieve the aged face. Experiments are carried out on three aging databases, and the results achieved clearly demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method in rendering a face with aging effects. Additionally, a series of evaluations prove its validity with respect to identity preservation and aging effect generation

Dictionary Learning and Sparse Coding for Third-order Super-symmetric Tensors

Super-symmetric tensors - a higher-order extension of scatter matrices - are becoming increasingly popular in machine learning and computer vision for modelling data statistics, co-occurrences, or even as visual descriptors. However, the size of these tensors are exponential in the data dimensionality, which is a significant concern. In this paper, we study third-order super-symmetric tensor descriptors in the context of dictionary learning and sparse coding. Our goal is to approximate these tensors as sparse conic combinations of atoms from a learned dictionary, where each atom is a symmetric positive semi-definite matrix. Apart from the significant benefits to tensor compression that this framework provides, our experiments demonstrate that the sparse coefficients produced by the scheme lead to better aggregation of high-dimensional data, and showcases superior performance on two common computer vision tasks compared to the state-of-the-art.Comment: 13 pages, NIP

Deep Appearance Models: A Deep Boltzmann Machine Approach for Face Modeling

The "interpretation through synthesis" approach to analyze face images, particularly Active Appearance Models (AAMs) method, has become one of the most successful face modeling approaches over the last two decades. AAM models have ability to represent face images through synthesis using a controllable parameterized Principal Component Analysis (PCA) model. However, the accuracy and robustness of the synthesized faces of AAM are highly depended on the training sets and inherently on the generalizability of PCA subspaces. This paper presents a novel Deep Appearance Models (DAMs) approach, an efficient replacement for AAMs, to accurately capture both shape and texture of face images under large variations. In this approach, three crucial components represented in hierarchical layers are modeled using the Deep Boltzmann Machines (DBM) to robustly capture the variations of facial shapes and appearances. DAMs are therefore superior to AAMs in inferencing a representation for new face images under various challenging conditions. The proposed approach is evaluated in various applications to demonstrate its robustness and capabilities, i.e. facial super-resolution reconstruction, facial off-angle reconstruction or face frontalization, facial occlusion removal and age estimation using challenging face databases, i.e. Labeled Face Parts in the Wild (LFPW), Helen and FG-NET. Comparing to AAMs and other deep learning based approaches, the proposed DAMs achieve competitive results in those applications, thus this showed their advantages in handling occlusions, facial representation, and reconstruction

Multi-modal Fusion for Diabetes Mellitus and Impaired Glucose Regulation Detection

Effective and accurate diagnosis of Diabetes Mellitus (DM), as well as its early stage Impaired Glucose Regulation (IGR), has attracted much attention recently. Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) [3], [5] etc. has proved that tongue, face and sublingual diagnosis as a noninvasive method is a reasonable way for disease detection. However, most previous works only focus on a single modality (tongue, face or sublingual) for diagnosis, although different modalities may provide complementary information for the diagnosis of DM and IGR. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-modal classification method to discriminate between DM (or IGR) and healthy controls. Specially, the tongue, facial and sublingual images are first collected by using a non-invasive capture device. The color, texture and geometry features of these three types of images are then extracted, respectively. Finally, our so-called multi-modal similar and specific learning (MMSSL) approach is proposed to combine features of tongue, face and sublingual, which not only exploits the correlation but also extracts individual components among them. Experimental results on a dataset consisting of 192 Healthy, 198 DM and 114 IGR samples (all samples were obtained from Guangdong Provincial Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine) substantiate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed method for the diagnosis of DM and IGR, compared to the case of using a single modality.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures, 30 conferenc

Fractional Local Neighborhood Intensity Pattern for Image Retrieval using Genetic Algorithm

In this paper, a new texture descriptor named "Fractional Local Neighborhood Intensity Pattern" (FLNIP) has been proposed for content based image retrieval (CBIR). It is an extension of the Local Neighborhood Intensity Pattern (LNIP)[1]. FLNIP calculates the relative intensity difference between a particular pixel and the center pixel of a 3x3 window by considering the relationship with adjacent neighbors. In this work, the fractional change in the local neighborhood involving the adjacent neighbors has been calculated first with respect to one of the eight neighbors of the center pixel of a 3x3 window. Next, the fractional change has been calculated with respect to the center itself. The two values of fractional change are next compared to generate a binary bit pattern. Both sign and magnitude information are encoded in a single descriptor as it deals with the relative change in magnitude in the adjacent neighborhood i.e., the comparison of the fractional change. The descriptor is applied on four multi-resolution images -- one being the raw image and the other three being filtered gaussian images obtained by applying gaussian filters of different standard deviations on the raw image to signify the importance of exploring texture information at different resolutions in an image. The four sets of distances obtained between the query and the target image are then combined with a genetic algorithm based approach to improve the retrieval performance by minimizing the distance between similar class images. The performance of the method has been tested for image retrieval on four popular databases. The precision and recall values observed on these databases have been compared with recent state-of-art local patterns. The proposed method has shown a significant improvement over many other existing methods.Comment: MTAP, Springer(Minor Revision

Face Recognition: A Novel Multi-Level Taxonomy based Survey

In a world where security issues have been gaining growing importance, face recognition systems have attracted increasing attention in multiple application areas, ranging from forensics and surveillance to commerce and entertainment. To help understanding the landscape and abstraction levels relevant for face recognition systems, face recognition taxonomies allow a deeper dissection and comparison of the existing solutions. This paper proposes a new, more encompassing and richer multi-level face recognition taxonomy, facilitating the organization and categorization of available and emerging face recognition solutions; this taxonomy may also guide researchers in the development of more efficient face recognition solutions. The proposed multi-level taxonomy considers levels related to the face structure, feature support and feature extraction approach. Following the proposed taxonomy, a comprehensive survey of representative face recognition solutions is presented. The paper concludes with a discussion on current algorithmic and application related challenges which may define future research directions for face recognition.Comment: This paper is a preprint of a paper submitted to IET Biometrics. If accepted, the copy of record will be available at the IET Digital Librar

Densely tracking sequences of 3D face scans

3D face dense tracking aims to find dense inter-frame correspondences in a sequence of 3D face scans and constitutes a powerful tool for many face analysis tasks, e.g., 3D dynamic facial expression analysis. The majority of the existing methods just fit a 3D face surface or model to a 3D target surface without considering temporal information between frames. In this paper, we propose a novel method for densely tracking sequences of 3D face scans, which ex- tends the non-rigid ICP algorithm by adding a novel specific criterion for temporal information. A novel fitting framework is presented for automatically tracking a full sequence of 3D face scans. The results of experiments carried out on the BU4D-FE database are promising, showing that the proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms for 3D face dense tracking.Comment: 8 page

Bayesian Fusion for Infrared and Visible Images

Infrared and visible image fusion has been a hot issue in image fusion. In this task, a fused image containing both the gradient and detailed texture information of visible images as well as the thermal radiation and highlighting targets of infrared images is expected to be obtained. In this paper, a novel Bayesian fusion model is established for infrared and visible images. In our model, the image fusion task is cast into a regression problem. To measure the variable uncertainty, we formulate the model in a hierarchical Bayesian manner. Aiming at making the fused image satisfy human visual system, the model incorporates the total-variation(TV) penalty. Subsequently, the model is efficiently inferred by the expectation-maximization(EM) algorithm. We test our algorithm on TNO and NIR image fusion datasets with several state-of-the-art approaches. Compared with the previous methods, the novel model can generate better fused images with high-light targets and rich texture details, which can improve the reliability of the target automatic detection and recognition system

Gender and Ethnicity Classification of Iris Images using Deep Class-Encoder

Soft biometric modalities have shown their utility in different applications including reducing the search space significantly. This leads to improved recognition performance, reduced computation time, and faster processing of test samples. Some common soft biometric modalities are ethnicity, gender, age, hair color, iris color, presence of facial hair or moles, and markers. This research focuses on performing ethnicity and gender classification on iris images. We present a novel supervised autoencoder based approach, Deep Class-Encoder, which uses class labels to learn discriminative representation for the given sample by mapping the learned feature vector to its label. The proposed model is evaluated on two datasets each for ethnicity and gender classification. The results obtained using the proposed Deep Class-Encoder demonstrate its effectiveness in comparison to existing approaches and state-of-the-art methods.Comment: International Joint Conference on Biometrics, 201

A Sparse Representation of Complete Local Binary Pattern Histogram for Human Face Recognition

Human face recognition has been a long standing problem in computer vision and pattern recognition. Facial analysis can be viewed as a two-fold problem, namely (i) facial representation, and (ii) classification. So far, many face representations have been proposed, a well-known method is the Local Binary Pattern (LBP), which has witnessed a growing interest. In this respect, we treat in this paper the issues of face representation as well as classification in a novel manner. On the one hand, we use a variant to LBP, so-called Complete Local Binary Pattern (CLBP), which differs from the basic LBP by coding a given local region using a given central pixel and Sing_ Magnitude difference. Subsequently, most of LBPbased descriptors use a fixed grid to code a given facial image, which technique is, in most cases, not robust to pose variation and misalignment. To cope with such issue, a representative Multi-Resolution Histogram (MH) decomposition is adopted in our work. On the other hand, having the histograms of the considered images extracted, we exploit their sparsity to construct a so-called Sparse Representation Classifier (SRC) for further face classification. Experimental results have been conducted on ORL face database, and pointed out the superiority of our scheme over other popular state-of-the-art techniques.Comment: Accepted (but unattended) in IEEE-EMBS International Conferences on Biomedical and Health Informatics (BHI