DICTIONARIES AND MANIFOLDS FOR FACE RECOGNITION ACROSS ILLUMINATION, AGING AND QUANTIZATION

During the past many decades, many face recognition algorithms have been proposed. The face recognition problem under controlled environment has been well studied and almost solved. However, in unconstrained environments, the performance of face recognition methods could still be significantly affected by factors such as illumination, pose, resolution, occlusion, aging, etc. In this thesis, we look into the problem of face recognition across these variations and quantization. We present a face recognition algorithm based on simultaneous sparse approximations under varying illumination and pose with dictionaries learned for each class. A novel test image is projected onto the span of the atoms in each learned dictionary. The resulting residual vectors are then used for classification. An image relighting technique based on pose-robust albedo estimation is used to generate multiple frontal images of the same person with variable lighting. As a result, the proposed algorithm has the ability to recognize human faces with high accuracy even when only a single or a very few images per person are provided for training. The efficiency of the proposed method is demonstrated using publicly available databases and it is shown that this method is efficient and can perform significantly better than many competitive face recognition algorithms. The problem of recognizing facial images across aging remains an open problem. We look into this problem by studying the growth in the facial shapes. Building on recent advances in landmark extraction, and statistical techniques for landmark-based shape analysis, we show that using well-defined shape spaces and its associated geometry, one can obtain significant performance improvements in face verification. Toward this end, we propose to model the facial shapes as points on a Grassmann manifold. The face verification problem is then formulated as a classification problem on this manifold. We then propose a relative craniofacial growth model which is based on the science of craniofacial anthropometry and integrate it with the Grassmann manifold and the SVM classifier. Experiments show that the proposed method is able to mitigate the variations caused by the aging progress and thus effectively improve the performance of open-set face verification across aging. In applications such as document understanding, only binary face images may be available as inputs to a face recognition algorithm. We investigate the effects of quantization on several classical face recognition algorithms. We study the performances of PCA and multiple exemplar discriminant analysis (MEDA) algorithms with quantized images and with binary images modified by distance and Box-Cox transforms. We propose a dictionary-based method for reconstructing the grey scale facial images from the quantized facial images. Two dictionaries with low mutual coherence are learned for the grey scale and quantized training images respectively using a modified KSVD method. A linear transform function between the sparse vectors of quantized images and the sparse vectors of grey scale images is estimated using the training data. In the testing stage, a grey scale image is reconstructed from the quantized image using the transform matrix and normalized dictionaries. The identities of the reconstructed grey scale images are then determined using the dictionary-based face recognition (DFR) algorithm. Experimental results show that the reconstructed images are similar to the original grey-scale images and the performance of face recognition on the quantized images is comparable to the performance on grey scale images. The online social network and social media is growing rapidly. It is interesting to study the impact of social network on computer vision algorithms. We address the problem of automated face recognition on a social network using a loopy belief propagation framework. The proposed approach propagates the identities of faces in photos across social graphs. We characterize its performance in terms of structural properties of the given social network. We propose a distance metric defined using face recognition results for detecting hidden connections. The performance of the proposed method is analyzed on graph structure networks, scalability, different degrees of nodes, labeling errors correction and hidden connections discovery. The result demonstrates that the constraints imposed by the social network have the potential to improve the performance of face recognition methods. The result also shows it is possible to discover hidden connections in a social network based on face recognition

Neural Illumination: Lighting Prediction for Indoor Environments

This paper addresses the task of estimating the light arriving from all directions to a 3D point observed at a selected pixel in an RGB image. This task is challenging because it requires predicting a mapping from a partial scene observation by a camera to a complete illumination map for a selected position, which depends on the 3D location of the selection, the distribution of unobserved light sources, the occlusions caused by scene geometry, etc. Previous methods attempt to learn this complex mapping directly using a single black-box neural network, which often fails to estimate high-frequency lighting details for scenes with complicated 3D geometry. Instead, we propose "Neural Illumination" a new approach that decomposes illumination prediction into several simpler differentiable sub-tasks: 1) geometry estimation, 2) scene completion, and 3) LDR-to-HDR estimation. The advantage of this approach is that the sub-tasks are relatively easy to learn and can be trained with direct supervision, while the whole pipeline is fully differentiable and can be fine-tuned with end-to-end supervision. Experiments show that our approach performs significantly better quantitatively and qualitatively than prior work

Subspace Representations for Robust Face and Facial Expression Recognition

Analyzing human faces and modeling their variations have always been of interest to the computer vision community. Face analysis based on 2D intensity images is a challenging problem, complicated by variations in pose, lighting, blur, and non-rigid facial deformations due to facial expressions. Among the different sources of variation, facial expressions are of interest as important channels of non-verbal communication. Facial expression analysis is also affected by changes in view-point and inter-subject variations in performing different expressions. This dissertation makes an attempt to address some of the challenges involved in developing robust algorithms for face and facial expression recognition by exploiting the idea of proper subspace representations for data. Variations in the visual appearance of an object mostly arise due to changes in illumination and pose. So we first present a video-based sequential algorithm for estimating the face albedo as an illumination-insensitive signature for face recognition. We show that by knowing/estimating the pose of the face at each frame of a sequence, the albedo can be efficiently estimated using a Kalman filter. Then we extend this to the case of unknown pose by simultaneously tracking the pose as well as updating the albedo through an efficient Bayesian inference method performed using a Rao-Blackwellized particle filter. Since understanding the effects of blur, especially motion blur, is an important problem in unconstrained visual analysis, we then propose a blur-robust recognition algorithm for faces with spatially varying blur. We model a blurred face as a weighted average of geometrically transformed instances of its clean face. We then build a matrix, for each gallery face, whose column space spans the space of all the motion blurred images obtained from the clean face. This matrix representation is then used to define a proper objective function and perform blur-robust face recognition. To develop robust and generalizable models for expression analysis one needs to break the dependence of the models on the choice of the coordinate frame of the camera. To this end, we build models for expressions on the affine shape-space (Grassmann manifold), as an approximation to the projective shape-space, by using a Riemannian interpretation of deformations that facial expressions cause on different parts of the face. This representation enables us to perform various expression analysis and recognition algorithms without the need for pose normalization as a preprocessing step. There is a large degree of inter-subject variations in performing various expressions. This poses an important challenge on developing robust facial expression recognition algorithms. To address this challenge, we propose a dictionary-based approach for facial expression analysis by decomposing expressions in terms of action units (AUs). First, we construct an AU-dictionary using domain experts' knowledge of AUs. To incorporate the high-level knowledge regarding expression decomposition and AUs, we then perform structure-preserving sparse coding by imposing two layers of grouping over AU-dictionary atoms as well as over the test image matrix columns. We use the computed sparse code matrix for each expressive face to perform expression decomposition and recognition. Most of the existing methods for the recognition of faces and expressions consider either the expression-invariant face recognition problem or the identity-independent facial expression recognition problem. We propose joint face and facial expression recognition using a dictionary-based component separation algorithm (DCS). In this approach, the given expressive face is viewed as a superposition of a neutral face component with a facial expression component, which is sparse with respect to the whole image. This assumption leads to a dictionary-based component separation algorithm, which benefits from the idea of sparsity and morphological diversity. The DCS algorithm uses the data-driven dictionaries to decompose an expressive test face into its constituent components. The sparse codes we obtain as a result of this decomposition are then used for joint face and expression recognition

Statistical/Geometric Techniques for Object Representation and Recognition

Object modeling and recognition are key areas of research in computer vision and graphics with wide range of applications. Though research in these areas is not new, traditionally most of it has focused on analyzing problems under controlled environments. The challenges posed by real life applications demand for more general and robust solutions. The wide variety of objects with large intra-class variability makes the task very challenging. The difficulty in modeling and matching objects also vary depending on the input modality. In addition, the easy availability of sensors and storage have resulted in tremendous increase in the amount of data that needs to be processed which requires efficient algorithms suitable for large-size databases. In this dissertation, we address some of the challenges involved in modeling and matching of objects in realistic scenarios. Object matching in images require accounting for large variability in the appearance due to changes in illumination and view point. Any real world object is characterized by its underlying shape and albedo, which unlike the image intensity are insensitive to changes in illumination conditions. We propose a stochastic filtering framework for estimating object albedo from a single intensity image by formulating the albedo estimation as an image estimation problem. We also show how this albedo estimate can be used for illumination insensitive object matching and for more accurate shape recovery from a single image using standard shape from shading formulation. We start with the simpler problem where the pose of the object is known and only the illumination varies. We then extend the proposed approach to handle unknown pose in addition to illumination variations. We also use the estimated albedo maps for another important application, which is recognizing faces across age progression. Many approaches which address the problem of modeling and recognizing objects from images assume that the underlying objects are of diffused texture. But most real world objects exhibit a combination of diffused and specular properties. We propose an approach for separating the diffused and specular reflectance from a given color image so that the algorithms proposed for objects of diffused texture become applicable to a much wider range of real world objects. Representing and matching the 2D and 3D geometry of objects is also an integral part of object matching with applications in gesture recognition, activity classification, trademark and logo recognition, etc. The challenge in matching 2D/3D shapes lies in accounting for the different rigid and non-rigid deformations, large intra-class variability, noise and outliers. In addition, since shapes are usually represented as a collection of landmark points, the shape matching algorithm also has to deal with the challenges of missing or unknown correspondence across these data points. We propose an efficient shape indexing approach where the different feature vectors representing the shape are mapped to a hash table. For a query shape, we show how the similar shapes in the database can be efficiently retrieved without the need for establishing correspondence making the algorithm extremely fast and scalable. We also propose an approach for matching and registration of 3D point cloud data across unknown or missing correspondence using an implicit surface representation. Finally, we discuss possible future directions of this research

Towards Generalized Frameworks for Object Recognition

Over the past few years, deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) based approaches have been immensely successful in tackling a diverse range of object recognition problems. Popular DCNN architectures like deep residual networks (ResNets) are highly generic, not just for classification, but also for high level tasks like detection/tracking which rely on classification DCNNs as their backbone. The generality of DCNNs however doesn't extend to image-to-image(Im2Im) regression tasks (eg: super-resolution, denoising, rgb-to-depth, relighting, etc). For such tasks, DCNNs are often highly task-specific and require specific ancillary post-processing methods. The major issue plaguing the design of generic architectures for such tasks is the tradeoff between context/locality given a fixed computation/memory budget. We first present a generic DCNN architecture for Im2Im regression that can be trained end-to-end without any further machinery. Our proposed architecture, the Recursively Branched Deconvolutional Network (RBDN), which features a cheap early multi-context image representation, an efficient recursive branching scheme with extensive parameter sharing and learnable upsampling. We provide qualitative/quantitative results on 3 diverse tasks: relighting, denoising and colorization and show that our proposed RBDN architecture obtains comparable results to the state-of-the-art on each of these tasks when used off-the-shelf without any post processing or task-specific architectural modifications. Second, we focus on gradient flow and optimization in ResNets. In particular, we theoretically analyze why pre-activation(v2) ResNets outperform the original ResNets(v1) on CIFAR datasets but not on ImageNet. Our analysis reveals that although v1-ResNets lack ensembling properties, they can have a higher effective depth in comparison to v2-ResNes. Subsequently, we show that downsampling projections (while only few in number) have a significantly detrimental effect on performance. We show that by simply replacing downsampling-projections with identity-like dense-reshape shortcuts, the classification results of standard residual architectures like ResNets, ResNeXts and SE-Nets improve by up to 1.2% on ImageNet, without any increase in computational complexity (FLOPs). Finally, we present a robust non-parametric probabilistic ensemble method for multi-classification, which outperforms the state-of-the-art ensemble methods on several machine learning and computer vision datasets for object recognition with statistically significant improvements. The approach is particularly geared towards multi-classification problems with very low training data and/or a fairly high proportion of outliers, for which training end-to-end DCNNs is not very beneficial