4,871 research outputs found
Infrared face recognition: a comprehensive review of methodologies and databases
Automatic face recognition is an area with immense practical potential which
includes a wide range of commercial and law enforcement applications. Hence it
is unsurprising that it continues to be one of the most active research areas
of computer vision. Even after over three decades of intense research, the
state-of-the-art in face recognition continues to improve, benefitting from
advances in a range of different research fields such as image processing,
pattern recognition, computer graphics, and physiology. Systems based on
visible spectrum images, the most researched face recognition modality, have
reached a significant level of maturity with some practical success. However,
they continue to face challenges in the presence of illumination, pose and
expression changes, as well as facial disguises, all of which can significantly
decrease recognition accuracy. Amongst various approaches which have been
proposed in an attempt to overcome these limitations, the use of infrared (IR)
imaging has emerged as a particularly promising research direction. This paper
presents a comprehensive and timely review of the literature on this subject.
Our key contributions are: (i) a summary of the inherent properties of infrared
imaging which makes this modality promising in the context of face recognition,
(ii) a systematic review of the most influential approaches, with a focus on
emerging common trends as well as key differences between alternative
methodologies, (iii) a description of the main databases of infrared facial
images available to the researcher, and lastly (iv) a discussion of the most
promising avenues for future research.Comment: Pattern Recognition, 2014. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap
with arXiv:1306.160
Statistical modelling for facial expression dynamics
PhDOne of the most powerful and fastest means of relaying emotions between humans are facial expressions.
The ability to capture, understand and mimic those emotions and their underlying dynamics
in the synthetic counterpart is a challenging task because of the complexity of human emotions, different
ways of conveying them, non-linearities caused by facial feature and head motion, and the
ever critical eye of the viewer. This thesis sets out to address some of the limitations of existing
techniques by investigating three components of expression modelling and parameterisation framework:
(1) Feature and expression manifold representation, (2) Pose estimation, and (3) Expression
dynamics modelling and their parameterisation for the purpose of driving a synthetic head avatar.
First, we introduce a hierarchical representation based on the Point Distribution Model (PDM).
Holistic representations imply that non-linearities caused by the motion of facial features, and intrafeature
correlations are implicitly embedded and hence have to be accounted for in the resulting
expression space. Also such representations require large training datasets to account for all possible
variations. To address those shortcomings, and to provide a basis for learning more subtle, localised
variations, our representation consists of tree-like structure where a holistic root component is decomposed
into leaves containing the jaw outline, each of the eye and eyebrows and the mouth. Each
of the hierarchical components is modelled according to its intrinsic functionality, rather than the
final, holistic expression label.
Secondly, we introduce a statistical approach for capturing an underlying low-dimension expression
manifold by utilising components of the previously defined hierarchical representation. As
Principal Component Analysis (PCA) based approaches cannot reliably capture variations caused by
large facial feature changes because of its linear nature, the underlying dynamics manifold for each
of the hierarchical components is modelled using a Hierarchical Latent Variable Model (HLVM) approach.
Whilst retaining PCA properties, such a model introduces a probability density model which
can deal with missing or incomplete data and allows discovery of internal within cluster structures.
All of the model parameters and underlying density model are automatically estimated during the
training stage. We investigate the usefulness of such a model to larger and unseen datasets.
Thirdly, we extend the concept of HLVM model to pose estimation to address the non-linear
shape deformations and definition of the plausible pose space caused by large head motion. Since
our head rarely stays still, and its movements are intrinsically connected with the way we perceive
and understand the expressions, pose information is an integral part of their dynamics. The proposed
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approach integrates into our existing hierarchical representation model. It is learned using sparse and
discreetly sampled training dataset, and generalises to a larger and continuous view-sphere.
Finally, we introduce a framework that models and extracts expression dynamics. In existing
frameworks, explicit definition of expression intensity and pose information, is often overlooked,
although usually implicitly embedded in the underlying representation. We investigate modelling
of the expression dynamics based on use of static information only, and focus on its sufficiency
for the task at hand. We compare a rule-based method that utilises the existing latent structure and
provides a fusion of different components with holistic and Bayesian Network (BN) approaches. An
Active Appearance Model (AAM) based tracker is used to extract relevant information from input
sequences. Such information is subsequently used to define the parametric structure of the underlying
expression dynamics. We demonstrate that such information can be utilised to animate a synthetic
head avatar.
Submitte
Neighborhood Defined Feature Selection Strategy for Improved Face Recognition in Different Sensor Modalitie
A novel feature selection strategy for improved face recognition in images with variations due to illumination conditions, facial expressions, and partial occlusions is presented in this dissertation. A hybrid face recognition system that uses feature maps of phase congruency and modular kernel spaces is developed. Phase congruency provides a measure that is independent of the overall magnitude of a signal, making it invariant to variations in image illumination and contrast. A novel modular kernel spaces approach is developed and implemented on the phase congruency feature maps. Smaller sub-regions from a predefined neighborhood within the phase congruency images of the training samples are merged to obtain a large set of features. These features are then projected into higher dimensional spaces using kernel methods. The unique modularization procedure developed in this research takes into consideration that the facial variations in a real world scenario are confined to local regions. The additional pixel dependencies that are considered based on their importance help in providing additional information for classification. This procedure also helps in robust localization of the variations, further improving classification accuracy. The effectiveness of the new feature selection strategy has been demonstrated by employing it in two specific applications via face authentication in low resolution cameras and face recognition using multiple sensors (visible and infrared).
The face authentication system uses low quality images captured by a web camera. The optical sensor of the web camera is very sensitive to environmental illumination variations. It is observed that the feature selection policy overcomes the facial and environmental variations. A methodology based on multiple training images and clustering is also incorporated to overcome the additional challenges of computational efficiency and the subject\u27s non involvement. A multi-sensor image fusion based face recognition methodology that uses the proposed feature selection technique is presented in this dissertation. Research studies have indicated that complementary information from different sensors helps in improving the recognition accuracy compared to individual modalities. A decision level fusion methodology is also developed which provides better performance compared to individual as well as data level fusion modalities. The new decision level fusion technique is also robust to registration discrepancies, which is a very important factor in operational scenarios.
Research work is progressing to use the new face recognition technique in multi-view images by employing independent systems for separate views and integrating the results with an appropriate voting procedure
A Novel Tensor Perceptual Color Framework based Facial Expression Recognition
The Robustness of Facial Expression Recognition (FER) is based on information contained in color facial images. The Tensor Perceptual Color Framework (TPCF) enables multilinear image analysis in different color spaces. This demonstrates that the color components provide additional information for robust FER. By using this framework color components RGB, YCbCr, CIELab or CIELuv space of color images are unfolded to 2-D tensors based on multilinear algebra and tensor concepts. The features of this unfolded image are extracted by using log-Gabor filter. The optimum features are selected based on mutual information quotient method in feature selection process. These features are classified using a multiclass linear discriminant analysis classifier. Experimental results demonstrate that color information has significant potential to improve emotion recognition performance due to the complementary characteristics of image textures
A survey of face detection, extraction and recognition
The goal of this paper is to present a critical survey of existing literatures on human face recognition over the last 4-5 years. Interest and research activities in face recognition have increased significantly over the past few years, especially after the American airliner tragedy on September 11 in 2001. While this growth largely is driven by growing application demands, such as static matching of controlled photographs as in mug shots matching, credit card verification to surveillance video images, identification for law enforcement and authentication for banking and security system access, advances in signal analysis techniques, such as wavelets and neural networks, are also important catalysts. As the number of proposed techniques increases, survey and evaluation becomes important
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