End-to-end 3D face reconstruction with deep neural networks

Monocular 3D facial shape reconstruction from a single 2D facial image has been an active research area due to its wide applications. Inspired by the success of deep neural networks (DNN), we propose a DNN-based approach for End-to-End 3D FAce Reconstruction (UH-E2FAR) from a single 2D image. Different from recent works that reconstruct and refine the 3D face in an iterative manner using both an RGB image and an initial 3D facial shape rendering, our DNN model is end-to-end, and thus the complicated 3D rendering process can be avoided. Moreover, we integrate in the DNN architecture two components, namely a multi-task loss function and a fusion convolutional neural network (CNN) to improve facial expression reconstruction. With the multi-task loss function, 3D face reconstruction is divided into neutral 3D facial shape reconstruction and expressive 3D facial shape reconstruction. The neutral 3D facial shape is class-specific. Therefore, higher layer features are useful. In comparison, the expressive 3D facial shape favors lower or intermediate layer features. With the fusion-CNN, features from different intermediate layers are fused and transformed for predicting the 3D expressive facial shape. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the superiority of our end-to-end framework in improving the accuracy of 3D face reconstruction.Comment: Accepted to CVPR1

3D Face Reconstruction by Learning from Synthetic Data

Fast and robust three-dimensional reconstruction of facial geometric structure from a single image is a challenging task with numerous applications. Here, we introduce a learning-based approach for reconstructing a three-dimensional face from a single image. Recent face recovery methods rely on accurate localization of key characteristic points. In contrast, the proposed approach is based on a Convolutional-Neural-Network (CNN) which extracts the face geometry directly from its image. Although such deep architectures outperform other models in complex computer vision problems, training them properly requires a large dataset of annotated examples. In the case of three-dimensional faces, currently, there are no large volume data sets, while acquiring such big-data is a tedious task. As an alternative, we propose to generate random, yet nearly photo-realistic, facial images for which the geometric form is known. The suggested model successfully recovers facial shapes from real images, even for faces with extreme expressions and under various lighting conditions.Comment: The first two authors contributed equally to this wor

Finding kernel function for stock market prediction with support vector regression

Stock market prediction is one of the fascinating issues of stock market research. Accurate stock prediction becomes the biggest challenge in investment industry because the distribution of stock data is changing over the time. Time series forcasting, Neural Network (NN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) are once commonly used for prediction on stock price. In this study, the data mining operation called time series forecasting is implemented. The large amount of stock data collected from Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange is used for the experiment to test the validity of SVMs regression. SVM is a new machine learning technique with principle of structural minimization risk, which have greater generalization ability and proved success in time series prediction. Two kernel functions namely Radial Basis Function and polynomial are compared for finding the accurate prediction values. Besides that, backpropagation neural network are also used to compare the predictions performance. Several experiments are conducted and some analyses on the experimental results are done. The results show that SVM with polynomial kernels provide a promising alternative tool in KLSE stock market prediction