Kernel Manifold Alignment

We introduce a kernel method for manifold alignment (KEMA) and domain adaptation that can match an arbitrary number of data sources without needing corresponding pairs, just few labeled examples in all domains. KEMA has interesting properties: 1) it generalizes other manifold alignment methods, 2) it can align manifolds of very different complexities, performing a sort of manifold unfolding plus alignment, 3) it can define a domain-specific metric to cope with multimodal specificities, 4) it can align data spaces of different dimensionality, 5) it is robust to strong nonlinear feature deformations, and 6) it is closed-form invertible which allows transfer across-domains and data synthesis. We also present a reduced-rank version for computational efficiency and discuss the generalization performance of KEMA under Rademacher principles of stability. KEMA exhibits very good performance over competing methods in synthetic examples, visual object recognition and recognition of facial expressions tasks

Gaussian process domain experts for model adaptation in facial behavior analysis

We present a novel approach for supervised domain adaptation that is based upon the probabilistic framework of Gaussian processes (GPs). Specifically, we introduce domain-specific GPs as local experts for facial expression classification from face images. The adaptation of the classifier is facilitated in probabilistic fashion by conditioning the target expert on multiple source experts. Furthermore, in contrast to existing adaptation approaches, we also learn a target expert from available target data solely. Then, a single and confident classifier is obtained by combining the predictions from multiple experts based on their confidence. Learning of the model is efficient and requires no retraining/reweighting of the source classifiers. We evaluate the proposed approach on two publicly available datasets for multi-class (MultiPIE) and multi-label (DISFA) facial expression classification. To this end, we perform adaptation of two contextual factors: where (view) and who (subject). We show in our experiments that the proposed approach consistently outperforms both source and target classifiers, while using as few as 30 target examples. It also outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches for supervised domain adaptation

Discriminatively Trained Latent Ordinal Model for Video Classification

We study the problem of video classification for facial analysis and human action recognition. We propose a novel weakly supervised learning method that models the video as a sequence of automatically mined, discriminative sub-events (eg. onset and offset phase for "smile", running and jumping for "highjump"). The proposed model is inspired by the recent works on Multiple Instance Learning and latent SVM/HCRF -- it extends such frameworks to model the ordinal aspect in the videos, approximately. We obtain consistent improvements over relevant competitive baselines on four challenging and publicly available video based facial analysis datasets for prediction of expression, clinical pain and intent in dyadic conversations and on three challenging human action datasets. We also validate the method with qualitative results and show that they largely support the intuitions behind the method.Comment: Paper accepted in IEEE TPAMI. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1604.0150

Self-supervised learning of a facial attribute embedding from video

We propose a self-supervised framework for learning facial attributes by simply watching videos of a human face speaking, laughing, and moving over time. To perform this task, we introduce a network, Facial Attributes-Net (FAb-Net), that is trained to embed multiple frames from the same video face-track into a common low-dimensional space. With this approach, we make three contributions: first, we show that the network can leverage information from multiple source frames by predicting confidence/attention masks for each frame; second, we demonstrate that using a curriculum learning regime improves the learned embedding; finally, we demonstrate that the network learns a meaningful face embedding that encodes information about head pose, facial landmarks and facial expression, i.e. facial attributes, without having been supervised with any labelled data. We are comparable or superior to state-of-the-art self-supervised methods on these tasks and approach the performance of supervised methods.Comment: To appear in BMVC 2018. Supplementary material can be found at http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/research/unsup_learn_watch_faces/fabnet.htm