228 research outputs found
Morphable Face Models - An Open Framework
In this paper, we present a novel open-source pipeline for face registration
based on Gaussian processes as well as an application to face image analysis.
Non-rigid registration of faces is significant for many applications in
computer vision, such as the construction of 3D Morphable face models (3DMMs).
Gaussian Process Morphable Models (GPMMs) unify a variety of non-rigid
deformation models with B-splines and PCA models as examples. GPMM separate
problem specific requirements from the registration algorithm by incorporating
domain-specific adaptions as a prior model. The novelties of this paper are the
following: (i) We present a strategy and modeling technique for face
registration that considers symmetry, multi-scale and spatially-varying
details. The registration is applied to neutral faces and facial expressions.
(ii) We release an open-source software framework for registration and
model-building, demonstrated on the publicly available BU3D-FE database. The
released pipeline also contains an implementation of an Analysis-by-Synthesis
model adaption of 2D face images, tested on the Multi-PIE and LFW database.
This enables the community to reproduce, evaluate and compare the individual
steps of registration to model-building and 3D/2D model fitting. (iii) Along
with the framework release, we publish a new version of the Basel Face Model
(BFM-2017) with an improved age distribution and an additional facial
expression model
3D Face Reconstruction from Light Field Images: A Model-free Approach
Reconstructing 3D facial geometry from a single RGB image has recently
instigated wide research interest. However, it is still an ill-posed problem
and most methods rely on prior models hence undermining the accuracy of the
recovered 3D faces. In this paper, we exploit the Epipolar Plane Images (EPI)
obtained from light field cameras and learn CNN models that recover horizontal
and vertical 3D facial curves from the respective horizontal and vertical EPIs.
Our 3D face reconstruction network (FaceLFnet) comprises a densely connected
architecture to learn accurate 3D facial curves from low resolution EPIs. To
train the proposed FaceLFnets from scratch, we synthesize photo-realistic light
field images from 3D facial scans. The curve by curve 3D face estimation
approach allows the networks to learn from only 14K images of 80 identities,
which still comprises over 11 Million EPIs/curves. The estimated facial curves
are merged into a single pointcloud to which a surface is fitted to get the
final 3D face. Our method is model-free, requires only a few training samples
to learn FaceLFnet and can reconstruct 3D faces with high accuracy from single
light field images under varying poses, expressions and lighting conditions.
Comparison on the BU-3DFE and BU-4DFE datasets show that our method reduces
reconstruction errors by over 20% compared to recent state of the art
CNN-based Real-time Dense Face Reconstruction with Inverse-rendered Photo-realistic Face Images
With the powerfulness of convolution neural networks (CNN), CNN based face
reconstruction has recently shown promising performance in reconstructing
detailed face shape from 2D face images. The success of CNN-based methods
relies on a large number of labeled data. The state-of-the-art synthesizes such
data using a coarse morphable face model, which however has difficulty to
generate detailed photo-realistic images of faces (with wrinkles). This paper
presents a novel face data generation method. Specifically, we render a large
number of photo-realistic face images with different attributes based on
inverse rendering. Furthermore, we construct a fine-detailed face image dataset
by transferring different scales of details from one image to another. We also
construct a large number of video-type adjacent frame pairs by simulating the
distribution of real video data. With these nicely constructed datasets, we
propose a coarse-to-fine learning framework consisting of three convolutional
networks. The networks are trained for real-time detailed 3D face
reconstruction from monocular video as well as from a single image. Extensive
experimental results demonstrate that our framework can produce high-quality
reconstruction but with much less computation time compared to the
state-of-the-art. Moreover, our method is robust to pose, expression and
lighting due to the diversity of data.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine
Intelligence, 201
{3D} Morphable Face Models -- Past, Present and Future
In this paper, we provide a detailed survey of 3D Morphable Face Models over the 20 years since they were first proposed. The challenges in building and applying these models, namely capture, modeling, image formation, and image analysis, are still active research topics, and we review the state-of-the-art in each of these areas. We also look ahead, identifying unsolved challenges, proposing directions for future research and highlighting the broad range of current and future applications
Towards Racially Unbiased Skin Tone Estimation via Scene Disambiguation
Virtual facial avatars will play an increasingly important role in immersive
communication, games and the metaverse, and it is therefore critical that they
be inclusive. This requires accurate recovery of the appearance, represented by
albedo, regardless of age, sex, or ethnicity. While significant progress has
been made on estimating 3D facial geometry, albedo estimation has received less
attention. The task is fundamentally ambiguous because the observed color is a
function of albedo and lighting, both of which are unknown. We find that
current methods are biased towards light skin tones due to (1) strongly biased
priors that prefer lighter pigmentation and (2) algorithmic solutions that
disregard the light/albedo ambiguity. To address this, we propose a new
evaluation dataset (FAIR) and an algorithm (TRUST) to improve albedo estimation
and, hence, fairness. Specifically, we create the first facial albedo
evaluation benchmark where subjects are balanced in terms of skin color, and
measure accuracy using the Individual Typology Angle (ITA) metric. We then
address the light/albedo ambiguity by building on a key observation: the image
of the full scene -- as opposed to a cropped image of the face -- contains
important information about lighting that can be used for disambiguation. TRUST
regresses facial albedo by conditioning both on the face region and a global
illumination signal obtained from the scene image. Our experimental results
show significant improvement compared to state-of-the-art methods on albedo
estimation, both in terms of accuracy and fairness. The evaluation benchmark
and code will be made available for research purposes at
https://trust.is.tue.mpg.de.Comment: Camera-Ready version, accepted at ECCV202
A comprehensive survey on Pose-Invariant Face Recognition
© 2016 ACM. The capacity to recognize faces under varied poses is a fundamental human ability that presents a unique challenge for computer vision systems. Compared to frontal face recognition, which has been intensively studied and has gradually matured in the past few decades, Pose-Invariant Face Recognition (PIFR) remains a largely unsolved problem. However, PIFR is crucial to realizing the full potential of face recognition for real-world applications, since face recognition is intrinsically a passive biometric technology for recognizing uncooperative subjects. In this article, we discuss the inherent difficulties in PIFR and present a comprehensive review of established techniques. Existing PIFR methods can be grouped into four categories, that is, pose-robust feature extraction approaches, multiview subspace learning approaches, face synthesis approaches, and hybrid approaches. The motivations, strategies, pros/cons, and performance of representative approaches are described and compared. Moreover, promising directions for future research are discussed
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