EXPERTNet Exigent Features Preservative Network for Facial Expression Recognition

Facial expressions have essential cues to infer the humans state of mind, that conveys adequate information to understand individuals actual feelings. Thus, automatic facial expression recognition is an interesting and crucial task to interpret the humans cognitive state through the machine. In this paper, we proposed an Exigent Features Preservative Network (EXPERTNet), to describe the features of the facial expressions. The EXPERTNet extracts only pertinent features and neglect others by using exigent feature (ExFeat) block, mainly comprises of elective layer. Specifically, elective layer selects the desired edge variation features from the previous layer outcomes, which are generated by applying different sized filters as 1 x 1, 3 x 3, 5 x 5 and 7 x 7. Different sized filters aid to elicits both micro and high-level features that enhance the learnability of neurons. ExFeat block preserves the spatial structural information of the facial expression, which allows to discriminate between different classes of facial expressions. Visual representation of the proposed method over different facial expressions shows the learning capability of the neurons of different layers. Experimental and comparative analysis results over four comprehensive datasets CK+, MMI DISFA and GEMEP-FERA, ensures the better performance of the proposed network as compared to existing networks

Deep Trans-layer Unsupervised Networks for Representation Learning

Learning features from massive unlabelled data is a vast prevalent topic for high-level tasks in many machine learning applications. The recent great improvements on benchmark data sets achieved by increasingly complex unsupervised learning methods and deep learning models with lots of parameters usually requires many tedious tricks and much expertise to tune. However, filters learned by these complex architectures are quite similar to standard hand-crafted features visually. In this paper, unsupervised learning methods, such as PCA or auto-encoder, are employed as the building block to learn filter banks at each layer. The lower layer responses are transferred to the last layer (trans-layer) to form a more complete representation retaining more information. In addition, some beneficial methods such as local contrast normalization and whitening are added to the proposed deep trans-layer networks to further boost performance. The trans-layer representations are followed by block histograms with binary encoder schema to learn translation and rotation invariant representations, which are utilized to do high-level tasks such as recognition and classification. Compared to traditional deep learning methods, the implemented feature learning method has much less parameters and is validated in several typical experiments, such as digit recognition on MNIST and MNIST variations, object recognition on Caltech 101 dataset and face verification on LFW dataset. The deep trans-layer unsupervised learning achieves 99.45% accuracy on MNIST dataset, 67.11% accuracy on 15 samples per class and 75.98% accuracy on 30 samples per class on Caltech 101 dataset, 87.10% on LFW dataset.Comment: 21 pages, 3 figure

Pose-Invariant Face Alignment with a Single CNN

Face alignment has witnessed substantial progress in the last decade. One of the recent focuses has been aligning a dense 3D face shape to face images with large head poses. The dominant technology used is based on the cascade of regressors, e.g., CNN, which has shown promising results. Nonetheless, the cascade of CNNs suffers from several drawbacks, e.g., lack of end-to-end training, hand-crafted features and slow training speed. To address these issues, we propose a new layer, named visualization layer, that can be integrated into the CNN architecture and enables joint optimization with different loss functions. Extensive evaluation of the proposed method on multiple datasets demonstrates state-of-the-art accuracy, while reducing the training time by more than half compared to the typical cascade of CNNs. In addition, we compare multiple CNN architectures with the visualization layer to further demonstrate the advantage of its utilization

Learning Channel Inter-dependencies at Multiple Scales on Dense Networks for Face Recognition

We propose a new deep network structure for unconstrained face recognition. The proposed network integrates several key components together in order to characterize complex data distributions, such as in unconstrained face images. Inspired by recent progress in deep networks, we consider some important concepts, including multi-scale feature learning, dense connections of network layers, and weighting different network flows, for building our deep network structure. The developed network is evaluated in unconstrained face matching, showing the capability of learning complex data distributions caused by face images with various qualities.Comment: 12 page

PCANet: A Simple Deep Learning Baseline for Image Classification?

In this work, we propose a very simple deep learning network for image classification which comprises only the very basic data processing components: cascaded principal component analysis (PCA), binary hashing, and block-wise histograms. In the proposed architecture, PCA is employed to learn multistage filter banks. It is followed by simple binary hashing and block histograms for indexing and pooling. This architecture is thus named as a PCA network (PCANet) and can be designed and learned extremely easily and efficiently. For comparison and better understanding, we also introduce and study two simple variations to the PCANet, namely the RandNet and LDANet. They share the same topology of PCANet but their cascaded filters are either selected randomly or learned from LDA. We have tested these basic networks extensively on many benchmark visual datasets for different tasks, such as LFW for face verification, MultiPIE, Extended Yale B, AR, FERET datasets for face recognition, as well as MNIST for hand-written digits recognition. Surprisingly, for all tasks, such a seemingly naive PCANet model is on par with the state of the art features, either prefixed, highly hand-crafted or carefully learned (by DNNs). Even more surprisingly, it sets new records for many classification tasks in Extended Yale B, AR, FERET datasets, and MNIST variations. Additional experiments on other public datasets also demonstrate the potential of the PCANet serving as a simple but highly competitive baseline for texture classification and object recognition

Half-CNN: A General Framework for Whole-Image Regression

The Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) has achieved great success in image classification. The classification model can also be utilized at image or patch level for many other applications, such as object detection and segmentation. In this paper, we propose a whole-image CNN regression model, by removing the full connection layer and training the network with continuous feature maps. This is a generic regression framework that fits many applications. We demonstrate this method through two tasks: simultaneous face detection & segmentation, and scene saliency prediction. The result is comparable with other models in the respective fields, using only a small scale network. Since the regression model is trained on corresponding image / feature map pairs, there are no requirements on uniform input size as opposed to the classification model. Our framework avoids classifier design, a process that may introduce too much manual intervention in model development. Yet, it is highly correlated to the classification network and offers some in-deep review of CNN structures

FH-GAN: Face Hallucination and Recognition using Generative Adversarial Network

There are many factors affecting visual face recognition, such as low resolution images, aging, illumination and pose variance, etc. One of the most important problem is low resolution face images which can result in bad performance on face recognition. Most of the general face recognition algorithms usually assume a sufficient resolution for the face images. However, in practice many applications often do not have sufficient image resolutions. The modern face hallucination models demonstrate reasonable performance to reconstruct high-resolution images from its corresponding low resolution images. However, they do not consider identity level information during hallucination which directly affects results of the recognition of low resolution faces. To address this issue, we propose a Face Hallucination Generative Adversarial Network (FH-GAN) which improves the quality of low resolution face images and accurately recognize those low quality images. Concretely, we make the following contributions: 1) we propose FH-GAN network, an end-to-end system, that improves both face hallucination and face recognition simultaneously. The novelty of this proposed network depends on incorporating identity information in a GAN-based face hallucination algorithm via combining a face recognition network for identity preserving. 2) We also propose a new face hallucination network, namely Dense Sparse Network (DSNet), which improves upon the state-of-art in face hallucination. 3) We demonstrate benefits of training the face recognition and GAN-based DSNet jointly by reporting good result on face hallucination and recognition.Comment: 9 page

ADS-ME: Anomaly Detection System for Micro-expression Spotting

Micro-expressions (MEs) are infrequent and uncontrollable facial events that can highlight emotional deception and appear in a high-stakes environment. This paper propose an algorithm for spatiotemporal MEs spotting. Since MEs are unusual events, we treat them as abnormal patterns that diverge from expected Normal Facial Behaviour (NFBs) patterns. NFBs correspond to facial muscle activations, eye blink/gaze events and mouth opening/closing movements that are all facial deformation but not MEs. We propose a probabilistic model to estimate the probability density function that models the spatiotemporal distributions of NFBs patterns. To rank the outputs, we compute the negative log-likelihood and we developed an adaptive thresholding technique to identify MEs from NFBs. While working only with NFBs data, the main challenge is to capture intrinsic spatiotemoral features, hence we design a recurrent convolutional autoencoder for feature representation. Finally, we show that our system is superior to previous works for MEs spotting.Comment: 35 pages, 9 figures, 3 table

A PCA-Based Convolutional Network

In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised deep learning model, called PCA-based Convolutional Network (PCN). The architecture of PCN is composed of several feature extraction stages and a nonlinear output stage. Particularly, each feature extraction stage includes two layers: a convolutional layer and a feature pooling layer. In the convolutional layer, the filter banks are simply learned by PCA. In the nonlinear output stage, binary hashing is applied. For the higher convolutional layers, the filter banks are learned from the feature maps that were obtained in the previous stage. To test PCN, we conducted extensive experiments on some challenging tasks, including handwritten digits recognition, face recognition and texture classification. The results show that PCN performs competitive with or even better than state-of-the-art deep learning models. More importantly, since there is no back propagation for supervised finetuning, PCN is much more efficient than existing deep networks.Comment: 8 pages,5 figure

Convolutional herbal prescription building method from multi-scale facial features

In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), facial features are important basis for diagnosis and treatment. A doctor of TCM can prescribe according to a patient's physical indicators such as face, tongue, voice, symptoms, pulse. Previous works analyze and generate prescription according to symptoms. However, research work to mine the association between facial features and prescriptions has not been found for the time being. In this work, we try to use deep learning methods to mine the relationship between the patient's face and herbal prescriptions (TCM prescriptions), and propose to construct convolutional neural networks that generate TCM prescriptions according to the patient's face image. It is a novel and challenging job. In order to mine features from different granularities of faces, we design a multi-scale convolutional neural network based on three-grained face, which mines the patient's face information from the organs, local regions, and the entire face. Our experiments show that convolutional neural networks can learn relevant information from face to prescribe, and the multi-scale convolutional neural networks based on three-grained face perform better