Facial Pose Estimation by Deep Learning from Label Distributions

Facial pose estimation has gained a lot of attentions in many practical applications, such as human-robot interaction, gaze estimation and driver monitoring. Meanwhile, end-to-end deep learning-based facial pose estimation is becoming more and more popular. However, facial pose estimation suffers from a key challenge: the lack of sufficient training data for many poses, especially for large poses. Inspired by the observation that the faces under close poses look similar, we reformulate the facial pose estimation as a label distribution learning problem, considering each face image as an example associated with a Gaussian label distribution rather than a single label, and construct a convolutional neural network which is trained with a multi-loss function on AFLW dataset and 300W-LP dataset to predict the facial poses directly from color image. Extensive experiments are conducted on several popular benchmarks, including AFLW2000, BIWI, AFLW and AFW, where our approach shows a significant advantage over other state-of-the-art methods.Comment: 9 pages,5 figures, Accepted by ICCV 2019 worksho

Diversity in Faces

Face recognition is a long standing challenge in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The goal is to create systems that accurately detect, recognize, verify, and understand human faces. There are significant technical hurdles in making these systems accurate, particularly in unconstrained settings due to confounding factors related to pose, resolution, illumination, occlusion, and viewpoint. However, with recent advances in neural networks, face recognition has achieved unprecedented accuracy, largely built on data-driven deep learning methods. While this is encouraging, a critical aspect that is limiting facial recognition accuracy and fairness is inherent facial diversity. Every face is different. Every face reflects something unique about us. Aspects of our heritage - including race, ethnicity, culture, geography - and our individual identify - age, gender, and other visible manifestations of self-expression, are reflected in our faces. We expect face recognition to work equally accurately for every face. Face recognition needs to be fair. As we rely on data-driven methods to create face recognition technology, we need to ensure necessary balance and coverage in training data. However, there are still scientific questions about how to represent and extract pertinent facial features and quantitatively measure facial diversity. Towards this goal, Diversity in Faces (DiF) provides a data set of one million annotated human face images for advancing the study of facial diversity. The annotations are generated using ten well-established facial coding schemes from the scientific literature. The facial coding schemes provide human-interpretable quantitative measures of facial features. We believe that by making the extracted coding schemes available on a large set of faces, we can accelerate research and development towards creating more fair and accurate facial recognition systems.Comment: Updated statistics after slight modification to dataset due to inactive links and deletion

DeepGUM: Learning Deep Robust Regression with a Gaussian-Uniform Mixture Model

In this paper, we address the problem of how to robustly train a ConvNet for regression, or deep robust regression. Traditionally, deep regression employs the L2 loss function, known to be sensitive to outliers, i.e. samples that either lie at an abnormal distance away from the majority of the training samples, or that correspond to wrongly annotated targets. This means that, during back-propagation, outliers may bias the training process due to the high magnitude of their gradient. In this paper, we propose DeepGUM: a deep regression model that is robust to outliers thanks to the use of a Gaussian-uniform mixture model. We derive an optimization algorithm that alternates between the unsupervised detection of outliers using expectation-maximization, and the supervised training with cleaned samples using stochastic gradient descent. DeepGUM is able to adapt to a continuously evolving outlier distribution, avoiding to manually impose any threshold on the proportion of outliers in the training set. Extensive experimental evaluations on four different tasks (facial and fashion landmark detection, age and head pose estimation) lead us to conclude that our novel robust technique provides reliability in the presence of various types of noise and protection against a high percentage of outliers.Comment: accepted at ECCV 201

Attended End-to-end Architecture for Age Estimation from Facial Expression Videos

The main challenges of age estimation from facial expression videos lie not only in the modeling of the static facial appearance, but also in the capturing of the temporal facial dynamics. Traditional techniques to this problem focus on constructing handcrafted features to explore the discriminative information contained in facial appearance and dynamics separately. This relies on sophisticated feature-refinement and framework-design. In this paper, we present an end-to-end architecture for age estimation, called Spatially-Indexed Attention Model (SIAM), which is able to simultaneously learn both the appearance and dynamics of age from raw videos of facial expressions. Specifically, we employ convolutional neural networks to extract effective latent appearance representations and feed them into recurrent networks to model the temporal dynamics. More importantly, we propose to leverage attention models for salience detection in both the spatial domain for each single image and the temporal domain for the whole video as well. We design a specific spatially-indexed attention mechanism among the convolutional layers to extract the salient facial regions in each individual image, and a temporal attention layer to assign attention weights to each frame. This two-pronged approach not only improves the performance by allowing the model to focus on informative frames and facial areas, but it also offers an interpretable correspondence between the spatial facial regions as well as temporal frames, and the task of age estimation. We demonstrate the strong performance of our model in experiments on a large, gender-balanced database with 400 subjects with ages spanning from 8 to 76 years. Experiments reveal that our model exhibits significant superiority over the state-of-the-art methods given sufficient training data.Comment: Accepted by Transactions on Image Processing (TIP

Soft-ranking Label Encoding for Robust Facial Age Estimation

Automatic facial age estimation can be used in a wide range of real-world applications. However, this process is challenging due to the randomness and slowness of the aging process. Accordingly, in this paper, we propose a comprehensive framework aimed at overcoming the challenges associated with facial age estimation. First, we propose a novel age encoding method, referred to as 'Soft-ranking', which encodes two important properties of facial age, i.e., the ordinal property and the correlation between adjacent ages. Therefore, Soft-ranking provides a richer supervision signal for training deep models. Moreover, we also carefully analyze existing evaluation protocols for age estimation, finding that the overlap in identity between the training and testing sets affects the relative performance of different age encoding methods. Finally, since existing face databases for age estimation are generally small, deep models tend to suffer from an overfitting problem. To address this issue, we propose a novel regularization strategy to encourage deep models to learn more robust features from facial parts for age estimation purposes. Extensive experiments indicate that the proposed techniques improve the age estimation performance; moreover, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on the three most popular age databases, $i.e.$, Morph II, CLAP2015, and CLAP2016

FP-Age: Leveraging Face Parsing Attention for Facial Age Estimation in the Wild

Image-based age estimation aims to predict a person's age from facial images. It is used in a variety of real-world applications. Although end-to-end deep models have achieved impressive results for age estimation on benchmark datasets, their performance in-the-wild still leaves much room for improvement due to the challenges caused by large variations in head pose, facial expressions, and occlusions. To address this issue, we propose a simple yet effective method to explicitly incorporate facial semantics into age estimation, so that the model would learn to correctly focus on the most informative facial components from unaligned facial images regardless of head pose and non-rigid deformation. To this end, we design a face parsing-based network to learn semantic information at different scales and a novel face parsing attention module to leverage these semantic features for age estimation. To evaluate our method on in-the-wild data, we also introduce a new challenging large-scale benchmark called IMDB-Clean. This dataset is created by semi-automatically cleaning the noisy IMDB-WIKI dataset using a constrained clustering method. Through comprehensive experiment on IMDB-Clean and other benchmark datasets, under both intra-dataset and cross-dataset evaluation protocols, we show that our method consistently outperforms all existing age estimation methods and achieves a new state-of-the-art performance. To the best of our knowledge, our work presents the first attempt of leveraging face parsing attention to achieve semantic-aware age estimation, which may be inspiring to other high level facial analysis tasks.Comment: Code and data will be available on https://github.com/hhj1897/age_estimatio

Elastic Neural Networks: A Scalable Framework for Embedded Computer Vision

We propose a new framework for image classification with deep neural networks. The framework introduces intermediate outputs to the computational graph of a network. This enables flexible control of the computational load and balances the tradeoff between accuracy and execution time. Moreover, we present an interesting finding that the intermediate outputs can act as a regularizer at training time, improving the prediction accuracy. In the experimental section we demonstrate the performance of our proposed framework with various commonly used pretrained deep networks in the use case of apparent age estimation.Comment: EUSIPCO 201

Learning from Longitudinal Face Demonstration - Where Tractable Deep Modeling Meets Inverse Reinforcement Learning

This paper presents a novel Subject-dependent Deep Aging Path (SDAP), which inherits the merits of both Generative Probabilistic Modeling and Inverse Reinforcement Learning to model the facial structures and the longitudinal face aging process of a given subject. The proposed SDAP is optimized using tractable log-likelihood objective functions with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) based deep feature extraction. Instead of applying a fixed aging development path for all input faces and subjects, SDAP is able to provide the most appropriate aging development path for individual subject that optimizes the reward aging formulation. Unlike previous methods that can take only one image as the input, SDAP further allows multiple images as inputs, i.e. all information of a subject at either the same or different ages, to produce the optimal aging path for the given subject. Finally, SDAP allows efficiently synthesizing in-the-wild aging faces. The proposed model is experimented in both tasks of face aging synthesis and cross-age face verification. The experimental results consistently show SDAP achieves the state-of-the-art performance on numerous face aging databases, i.e. FG-NET, MORPH, AginG Faces in the Wild (AGFW), and Cross-Age Celebrity Dataset (CACD). Furthermore, we also evaluate the performance of SDAP on large-scale Megaface challenge to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed solution

BridgeNet: A Continuity-Aware Probabilistic Network for Age Estimation

Age estimation is an important yet very challenging problem in computer vision. Existing methods for age estimation usually apply a divide-and-conquer strategy to deal with heterogeneous data caused by the non-stationary aging process. However, the facial aging process is also a continuous process, and the continuity relationship between different components has not been effectively exploited. In this paper, we propose BridgeNet for age estimation, which aims to mine the continuous relation between age labels effectively. The proposed BridgeNet consists of local regressors and gating networks. Local regressors partition the data space into multiple overlapping subspaces to tackle heterogeneous data and gating networks learn continuity aware weights for the results of local regressors by employing the proposed bridge-tree structure, which introduces bridge connections into tree models to enforce the similarity between neighbor nodes. Moreover, these two components of BridgeNet can be jointly learned in an end-to-end way. We show experimental results on the MORPH II, FG-NET and Chalearn LAP 2015 datasets and find that BridgeNet outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.Comment: CVPR 201

Modeling of Facial Aging and Kinship: A Survey

Computational facial models that capture properties of facial cues related to aging and kinship increasingly attract the attention of the research community, enabling the development of reliable methods for age progression, age estimation, age-invariant facial characterization, and kinship verification from visual data. In this paper, we review recent advances in modeling of facial aging and kinship. In particular, we provide an up-to date, complete list of available annotated datasets and an in-depth analysis of geometric, hand-crafted, and learned facial representations that are used for facial aging and kinship characterization. Moreover, evaluation protocols and metrics are reviewed and notable experimental results for each surveyed task are analyzed. This survey allows us to identify challenges and discuss future research directions for the development of robust facial models in real-world conditions