Toward a flexible facial analysis framework in OpenISS for visual effects

Facial analysis, including tasks such as face detection, facial landmark detection, and facial expression recognition, is a significant research domain in computer vision for visual effects. It can be used in various domains such as facial feature mapping for movie animation, biometrics/face recognition for security systems, and driver fatigue monitoring for transportation safety assistance. Most applications involve basic face and landmark detection as preliminary analysis approaches before proceeding into further specialized processing applications. As technology develops, there are plenty of implementations and resources for each task available for researchers, but the key missing properties among them all are fexibility and usability. The integration of functionality components involves complex configurations for each connection joint which is typically problematic with poor reusability and adjustability. The lack of support for integrating different functionality components greatly impact the research effort and cost for individual researchers, which also leads us to the idea of providing a framework solution that can help regarding the issue once and for all. To address this problem, we propose a user-friendly and highly expandable facial analysis framework solution. It contains a core that supports fundamental services for the framework, and a facial analysis module composed of implementations for facial analysis tasks. We evaluate our framework solution and achieve our goals of instantiating the facial analysis specialized framework, which essentially perform tasks in face detection, facial landmark detection, and facial expression recognition. This framework solution as a whole, solves the industry problem of lacking an execution platform for integrated facial analysis implementations and fills the gap in visual effects industry

Mathematical modeling for partial object detection.

From a computer vision point of view, the image is a scene consisting of objects of interest and a background represented by everything else in the image. The relations and interactions among these objects are the key factors for scene understanding. In this dissertation, a mathematical model is designed for the detection of partially occluded faces captured in unconstrained real life conditions. The proposed model novelty comes from explicitly considering certain objects that are common to occlude faces and embedding them in the face model. This enables the detection of faces in difficult settings and provides more information to subsequent analysis in addition to the bounding box of the face. In the proposed Selective Part Models (SPM), the face is modelled as a collection of parts that can be selected from the visible regular facial parts and some of the occluding objects which commonly interact with faces such as sunglasses, caps, hands, shoulders, and other faces. With the face detection being the first step in the face recognition pipeline, the proposed model does not only detect partially occluded faces efficiently but it also suggests the occluded parts to be excluded from the subsequent recognition step. The model was tested on several recent face detection databases and benchmarks and achieved state of the art performance. In addition, detailed analysis for the performance with respect to different types of occlusion were provided. Moreover, a new database was collected for evaluating face detectors focusing on the partial occlusion problem. This dissertation highlights the importance of explicitly handling the partial occlusion problem in face detection and shows its efficiency in enhancing both the face detection performance and the subsequent recognition performance of partially occluded faces. The broader impact of the proposed detector exceeds the common security applications by using it for human robot interaction. The humanoid robot Nao is used to help in teaching children with autism and the proposed detector is used to achieve natural interaction between the robot and the children by detecting their faces which can be used for recognition or more interestingly for adaptive interaction by analyzing their expressions

CMS-RCNN: Contextual Multi-Scale Region-based CNN for Unconstrained Face Detection

Robust face detection in the wild is one of the ultimate components to support various facial related problems, i.e. unconstrained face recognition, facial periocular recognition, facial landmarking and pose estimation, facial expression recognition, 3D facial model construction, etc. Although the face detection problem has been intensely studied for decades with various commercial applications, it still meets problems in some real-world scenarios due to numerous challenges, e.g. heavy facial occlusions, extremely low resolutions, strong illumination, exceptionally pose variations, image or video compression artifacts, etc. In this paper, we present a face detection approach named Contextual Multi-Scale Region-based Convolution Neural Network (CMS-RCNN) to robustly solve the problems mentioned above. Similar to the region-based CNNs, our proposed network consists of the region proposal component and the region-of-interest (RoI) detection component. However, far apart of that network, there are two main contributions in our proposed network that play a significant role to achieve the state-of-the-art performance in face detection. Firstly, the multi-scale information is grouped both in region proposal and RoI detection to deal with tiny face regions. Secondly, our proposed network allows explicit body contextual reasoning in the network inspired from the intuition of human vision system. The proposed approach is benchmarked on two recent challenging face detection databases, i.e. the WIDER FACE Dataset which contains high degree of variability, as well as the Face Detection Dataset and Benchmark (FDDB). The experimental results show that our proposed approach trained on WIDER FACE Dataset outperforms strong baselines on WIDER FACE Dataset by a large margin, and consistently achieves competitive results on FDDB against the recent state-of-the-art face detection methods

Face modeling for face recognition in the wild.

Face understanding is considered one of the most important topics in computer vision field since the face is a rich source of information in social interaction. Not only does the face provide information about the identity of people, but also of their membership in broad demographic categories (including sex, race, and age), and about their current emotional state. Facial landmarks extraction is the corner stone in the success of different facial analyses and understanding applications. In this dissertation, a novel facial modeling is designed for facial landmarks detection in unconstrained real life environment from different image modalities including infra-red and visible images. In the proposed facial landmarks detector, a part based model is incorporated with holistic face information. In the part based model, the face is modeled by the appearance of different face part(e.g., right eye, left eye, left eyebrow, nose, mouth) and their geometric relation. The appearance is described by a novel feature referred to as pixel difference feature. This representation is three times faster than the state-of-art in feature representation. On the other hand, to model the geometric relation between the face parts, the complex Bingham distribution is adapted from the statistical community into computer vision for modeling the geometric relationship between the facial elements. The global information is incorporated with the local part model using a regression model. The model results outperform the state-of-art in detecting facial landmarks. The proposed facial landmark detector is tested in two computer vision problems: boosting the performance of face detectors by rejecting pseudo faces and camera steering in multi-camera network. To highlight the applicability of the proposed model for different image modalities, it has been studied in two face understanding applications which are face recognition from visible images and physiological measurements for autistic individuals from thermal images. Recognizing identities from faces under different poses, expressions and lighting conditions from a complex background is an still unsolved problem even with accurate detection of landmark. Therefore, a learning similarity measure is proposed. The proposed measure responds only to the difference in identities and filter illuminations and pose variations. similarity measure makes use of statistical inference in the image plane. Additionally, the pose challenge is tackled by two new approaches: assigning different weights for different face part based on their visibility in image plane at different pose angles and synthesizing virtual facial images for each subject at different poses from single frontal image. The proposed framework is demonstrated to be competitive with top performing state-of-art methods which is evaluated on standard benchmarks in face recognition in the wild. The other framework for the face understanding application, which is a physiological measures for autistic individual from infra-red images. In this framework, accurate detecting and tracking Superficial Temporal Arteria (STA) while the subject is moving, playing, and interacting in social communication is a must. It is very challenging to track and detect STA since the appearance of the STA region changes over time and it is not discriminative enough from other areas in face region. A novel concept in detection, called supporter collaboration, is introduced. In support collaboration, the STA is detected and tracked with the help of face landmarks and geometric constraint. This research advanced the field of the emotion recognition

Object Detection in 20 Years: A Survey

Object detection, as of one the most fundamental and challenging problems in computer vision, has received great attention in recent years. Its development in the past two decades can be regarded as an epitome of computer vision history. If we think of today's object detection as a technical aesthetics under the power of deep learning, then turning back the clock 20 years we would witness the wisdom of cold weapon era. This paper extensively reviews 400+ papers of object detection in the light of its technical evolution, spanning over a quarter-century's time (from the 1990s to 2019). A number of topics have been covered in this paper, including the milestone detectors in history, detection datasets, metrics, fundamental building blocks of the detection system, speed up techniques, and the recent state of the art detection methods. This paper also reviews some important detection applications, such as pedestrian detection, face detection, text detection, etc, and makes an in-deep analysis of their challenges as well as technical improvements in recent years.Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE TPAMI for possible publicatio