Fast Landmark Localization with 3D Component Reconstruction and CNN for Cross-Pose Recognition

Two approaches are proposed for cross-pose face recognition, one is based on the 3D reconstruction of facial components and the other is based on the deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Unlike most 3D approaches that consider holistic faces, the proposed approach considers 3D facial components. It segments a 2D gallery face into components, reconstructs the 3D surface for each component, and recognizes a probe face by component features. The segmentation is based on the landmarks located by a hierarchical algorithm that combines the Faster R-CNN for face detection and the Reduced Tree Structured Model for landmark localization. The core part of the CNN-based approach is a revised VGG network. We study the performances with different settings on the training set, including the synthesized data from 3D reconstruction, the real-life data from an in-the-wild database, and both types of data combined. We investigate the performances of the network when it is employed as a classifier or designed as a feature extractor. The two recognition approaches and the fast landmark localization are evaluated in extensive experiments, and compared to stateof-the-art methods to demonstrate their efficacy.Comment: 14 pages, 12 figures, 4 table

Beyond Classification: Latent User Interests Profiling from Visual Contents Analysis

User preference profiling is an important task in modern online social networks (OSN). With the proliferation of image-centric social platforms, such as Pinterest, visual contents have become one of the most informative data streams for understanding user preferences. Traditional approaches usually treat visual content analysis as a general classification problem where one or more labels are assigned to each image. Although such an approach simplifies the process of image analysis, it misses the rich context and visual cues that play an important role in people's perception of images. In this paper, we explore the possibilities of learning a user's latent visual preferences directly from image contents. We propose a distance metric learning method based on Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to directly extract similarity information from visual contents and use the derived distance metric to mine individual users' fine-grained visual preferences. Through our preliminary experiments using data from 5,790 Pinterest users, we show that even for the images within the same category, each user possesses distinct and individually-identifiable visual preferences that are consistent over their lifetime. Our results underscore the untapped potential of finer-grained visual preference profiling in understanding users' preferences.Comment: 2015 IEEE 15th International Conference on Data Mining Workshop

Side-View Face Recognition

Side-view face recognition is a challenging problem with many applications. Especially in real-life scenarios where the environment is uncontrolled, coping with pose variations up to side-view positions is an important task for face recognition. In this paper we discuss the use of side view face recognition techniques to be used in house safety applications. Our aim is to recognize people as they pass through a door, and estimate their location in the house. Here, we compare available databases appropriate for this task, and review current methods for profile face recognition