13,301 research outputs found
Dynamic Facial Expression Generation on Hilbert Hypersphere with Conditional Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Nets
In this work, we propose a novel approach for generating videos of the six
basic facial expressions given a neutral face image. We propose to exploit the
face geometry by modeling the facial landmarks motion as curves encoded as
points on a hypersphere. By proposing a conditional version of manifold-valued
Wasserstein generative adversarial network (GAN) for motion generation on the
hypersphere, we learn the distribution of facial expression dynamics of
different classes, from which we synthesize new facial expression motions. The
resulting motions can be transformed to sequences of landmarks and then to
images sequences by editing the texture information using another conditional
Generative Adversarial Network. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first
work that explores manifold-valued representations with GAN to address the
problem of dynamic facial expression generation. We evaluate our proposed
approach both quantitatively and qualitatively on two public datasets;
Oulu-CASIA and MUG Facial Expression. Our experimental results demonstrate the
effectiveness of our approach in generating realistic videos with continuous
motion, realistic appearance and identity preservation. We also show the
efficiency of our framework for dynamic facial expressions generation, dynamic
facial expression transfer and data augmentation for training improved emotion
recognition models
Kinship Verification from Videos using Spatio-Temporal Texture Features and Deep Learning
Automatic kinship verification using facial images is a relatively new and
challenging research problem in computer vision. It consists in automatically
predicting whether two persons have a biological kin relation by examining
their facial attributes. While most of the existing works extract shallow
handcrafted features from still face images, we approach this problem from
spatio-temporal point of view and explore the use of both shallow texture
features and deep features for characterizing faces. Promising results,
especially those of deep features, are obtained on the benchmark UvA-NEMO Smile
database. Our extensive experiments also show the superiority of using videos
over still images, hence pointing out the important role of facial dynamics in
kinship verification. Furthermore, the fusion of the two types of features
(i.e. shallow spatio-temporal texture features and deep features) shows
significant performance improvements compared to state-of-the-art methods.Comment: 7 page
Considerations for believable emotional facial expression animation
Facial expressions can be used to communicate emotional states through the use of universal signifiers within key regions of the face. Psychology research has identified what these signifiers are and how different combinations and variations can be interpreted. Research into expressions has informed animation practice, but as yet very little is known about the movement within and between emotional expressions. A better understanding of sequence, timing, and duration could better inform the production of believable animation. This paper introduces the idea of expression choreography, and how tests of observer perception might enhance our understanding of moving emotional expressions
Subjectivity and complexity of facial attractiveness
The origin and meaning of facial beauty represent a longstanding puzzle.
Despite the profuse literature devoted to facial attractiveness, its very
nature, its determinants and the nature of inter-person differences remain
controversial issues. Here we tackle such questions proposing a novel
experimental approach in which human subjects, instead of rating natural faces,
are allowed to efficiently explore the face-space and 'sculpt' their favorite
variation of a reference facial image. The results reveal that different
subjects prefer distinguishable regions of the face-space, highlighting the
essential subjectivity of the phenomenon.The different sculpted facial vectors
exhibit strong correlations among pairs of facial distances, characterising the
underlying universality and complexity of the cognitive processes, and the
relative relevance and robustness of the different facial distances.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures. Supplementary information: 26 pages, 13 figure
Learning Temporal Alignment Uncertainty for Efficient Event Detection
In this paper we tackle the problem of efficient video event detection. We
argue that linear detection functions should be preferred in this regard due to
their scalability and efficiency during estimation and evaluation. A popular
approach in this regard is to represent a sequence using a bag of words (BOW)
representation due to its: (i) fixed dimensionality irrespective of the
sequence length, and (ii) its ability to compactly model the statistics in the
sequence. A drawback to the BOW representation, however, is the intrinsic
destruction of the temporal ordering information. In this paper we propose a
new representation that leverages the uncertainty in relative temporal
alignments between pairs of sequences while not destroying temporal ordering.
Our representation, like BOW, is of a fixed dimensionality making it easily
integrated with a linear detection function. Extensive experiments on CK+,
6DMG, and UvA-NEMO databases show significant performance improvements across
both isolated and continuous event detection tasks.Comment: Appeared in DICTA 2015, 8 page
Relating Objective and Subjective Performance Measures for AAM-based Visual Speech Synthesizers
We compare two approaches for synthesizing visual speech using Active Appearance Models (AAMs): one that utilizes acoustic features as input, and one that utilizes a phonetic transcription as input. Both synthesizers are trained using the same data and the performance is measured using both objective and subjective testing. We investigate the impact of likely sources of error in the synthesized visual speech by introducing typical errors into real visual speech sequences and subjectively measuring the perceived degradation. When only a small region (e.g. a single syllable) of ground-truth visual speech is incorrect we find that the subjective score for the entire sequence is subjectively lower than sequences generated by our synthesizers. This observation motivates further consideration of an often ignored issue, which is to what extent are subjective measures correlated with objective measures of performance? Significantly, we find that the most commonly used objective measures of performance are not necessarily the best indicator of viewer perception of quality. We empirically evaluate alternatives and show that the cost of a dynamic time warp of synthesized visual speech parameters to the respective ground-truth parameters is a better indicator of subjective quality
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