22,373 research outputs found
FACE RECOGNITION AND VERIFICATION IN UNCONSTRAINED ENVIRIONMENTS
Face recognition has been a long standing problem in computer vision. General
face recognition is challenging because of large appearance variability due to
factors including pose, ambient lighting, expression, size of the face, age, and distance
from the camera, etc. There are very accurate techniques to perform face
recognition in controlled environments, especially when large numbers of samples
are available for each face (individual). However, face identification under uncontrolled(
unconstrained) environments or with limited training data is still an unsolved
problem. There are two face recognition tasks: face identification (who is who in
a probe face set, given a gallery face set) and face verification (same or not, given
two faces). In this work, we study both face identification and verification in unconstrained
environments.
Firstly, we propose a face verification framework that combines Partial Least
Squares (PLS) and the One-Shot similarity model[1]. The idea is to describe a
face with a large feature set combining shape, texture and color information. PLS
regression is applied to perform multi-channel feature weighting on this large feature
set. Finally the PLS regression is used to compute the similarity score of an image
pair by One-Shot learning (using a fixed negative set).
Secondly, we study face identification with image sets, where the gallery and
probe are sets of face images of an individual. We model a face set by its covariance
matrix (COV) which is a natural 2nd-order statistic of a sample set.By exploring an
efficient metric for the SPD matrices, i.e., Log-Euclidean Distance (LED), we derive
a kernel function that explicitly maps the covariance matrix from the Riemannian
manifold to Euclidean space. Then, discriminative learning is performed on the
COV manifold: the learning aims to maximize the between-class COV distance and
minimize the within-class COV distance.
Sparse representation and dictionary learning have been widely used in face
recognition, especially when large numbers of samples are available for each face
(individual). Sparse coding is promising since it provides a more stable and discriminative
face representation. In the last part of our work, we explore sparse
coding and dictionary learning for face verification application. More specifically,
in one approach, we apply sparse representations to face verification in two ways
via a fix reference set as dictionary. In the other approach, we propose a dictionary
learning framework with explicit pairwise constraints, which unifies the discriminative
dictionary learning for pair matching (face verification) and classification (face
recognition) problems
Sparse and Deep Representations for Face Recognition and Object Detection
Face recognition and object detection are two very fundamental visual recognition applications in computer vision. How to learn “good” feature representations using machine learning has become the cornerstone of perception-based systems. A good feature representation is often the one that is robust and discriminative to multiple instances of the same category. Starting from features such as intensity, histogram etc. in the image, followed by hand-crafted features, to the most recent sophisticated deep feature representations, we have witnessed the remarkable improvement in the ability of a feature learning algorithm to perform pattern recognition tasks such as face recognition and object detection. One of the conventional feature learning methods, dictionary learning has been proposed to learn discriminative and sparse representations for visual recognition. These dictionary learning methods can learn both representative and discriminative dictionaries, and the associated sparse representations are effective for vision tasks such as face recognition. More recently, deep features have been widely adopted by the computer vision community owing to the powerful deep neural network, which is capable of distilling information from high dimensional input spaces to a low dimensional semantic space. The research problems which comprise this dissertation lie at the cross section of conventional feature and deep feature learning approaches. Thus, in this dissertation, we study both sparse and deep representations for face recognition and object detection.
First, we begin by studying the topic of spare representations. We present a simple thresholded feature learning algorithm under sparse support recovery. We show that under certain conditions, the thresholded feature exactly recovers the nonzero support of the sparse code. Secondly, based on the theoretical guarantees, we derive the model and algorithm named Dictionary Learning for Thresholded Features (DLTF), to learn the dictionary that is optimized for the thresholded feature. The DLTF dictionaries are specifically designed for using the thresholded feature at inference, which prioritize simplicity, efficiency, general usability and theoretical guarantees. Both synthetic simulations and real-data experiments (i.e. image clustering and unsupervised hashing) verify the competitive quantitative results and remarkable efficiency of applying thresholded features with DLTF dictionaries.
Continuing our focus on investigating the sparse representation and its application to computer vision tasks, we address the sparse representations for unconstrained face verification/recognition problem. In the first part, we address the video-based face recognition problem since it brings more challenges due to the fact that the videos are often acquired under significant variations in poses, expressions, lighting conditions and backgrounds. In order to extract representations that are robust to these variations, we propose a structured dictionary learning framework. Specifically, we employ dictionary learning and low-rank approximation methods to preserve the invariant structure of face images in videos. The learned structured dictionary is both discriminative and reconstructive. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through extensive experiments on three video-based face recognition datasets.
Recently, template-based face verification has gained more popularity. Unlike traditional verification tasks, which evaluate on image-to-image or video-to-video pairs, template-based face verification/recognition methods can exploit training and/or gallery data containing a mixture of both images or videos from the person of interest. In the second part, we propose a regularized sparse coding approach for template-based face verification. First, we construct a reference dictionary, which represents the training set. Then we learn the discriminative sparse codes of the templates for verification through the proposed template regularized sparse coding approach. Finally, we measure the similarity between templates.
However, in real world scenarios, training and test data are sampled from different distributions. Therefore, we also extend the dictionary learning techniques to tackle the domain adaptation problem, where the data from the training set (source domain) and test set (target domain) have different underlying distributions (domain shift). We propose a domain-adaptive dictionary learning framework to model the domain shift by generating a set of intermediate domains. These intermediate domains bridge the gap between the source and target domains. Specifically, we not only learn a common dictionary to encode the domain-shared features but also learn a set of domain specific dictionaries to model the domain shift. This separation enables us to learn more compact and reconstructive dictionaries for domain adaptation. The domain-adaptive features for recognition are finally derived by aligning all the recovered feature representations of both source and target along the domain path. We evaluate our approach on both cross-domain face recognition and object classification tasks.
Finally, we study another fundamental problem in computer vision: generic object detection. Object detection has become one of the most valuable pattern recognition tasks, with great benefits in scene understanding, face recognition, action recognition, robotics and self-driving vehicles, etc. We propose a novel object detector named "Deep Regionlets" by blending deep learning and the traditional regionlet method. The proposed framework "Deep Regionlets" is able to address the limitations of traditional regionlet methods, leading to significant precision improvement by exploiting the power of deep convolutional neural networks. Furthermore, we conduct a detailed analysis of our approach to understand its merits and properties. Extensive experiments on two detection benchmark datasets show that the proposed deep regionlet approach outperforms several state-of-the-art competitors
On Robust Face Recognition via Sparse Encoding: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
In the field of face recognition, Sparse Representation (SR) has received
considerable attention during the past few years. Most of the relevant
literature focuses on holistic descriptors in closed-set identification
applications. The underlying assumption in SR-based methods is that each class
in the gallery has sufficient samples and the query lies on the subspace
spanned by the gallery of the same class. Unfortunately, such assumption is
easily violated in the more challenging face verification scenario, where an
algorithm is required to determine if two faces (where one or both have not
been seen before) belong to the same person. In this paper, we first discuss
why previous attempts with SR might not be applicable to verification problems.
We then propose an alternative approach to face verification via SR.
Specifically, we propose to use explicit SR encoding on local image patches
rather than the entire face. The obtained sparse signals are pooled via
averaging to form multiple region descriptors, which are then concatenated to
form an overall face descriptor. Due to the deliberate loss spatial relations
within each region (caused by averaging), the resulting descriptor is robust to
misalignment & various image deformations. Within the proposed framework, we
evaluate several SR encoding techniques: l1-minimisation, Sparse Autoencoder
Neural Network (SANN), and an implicit probabilistic technique based on
Gaussian Mixture Models. Thorough experiments on AR, FERET, exYaleB, BANCA and
ChokePoint datasets show that the proposed local SR approach obtains
considerably better and more robust performance than several previous
state-of-the-art holistic SR methods, in both verification and closed-set
identification problems. The experiments also show that l1-minimisation based
encoding has a considerably higher computational than the other techniques, but
leads to higher recognition rates
A Proximity-Aware Hierarchical Clustering of Faces
In this paper, we propose an unsupervised face clustering algorithm called
"Proximity-Aware Hierarchical Clustering" (PAHC) that exploits the local
structure of deep representations. In the proposed method, a similarity measure
between deep features is computed by evaluating linear SVM margins. SVMs are
trained using nearest neighbors of sample data, and thus do not require any
external training data. Clusters are then formed by thresholding the similarity
scores. We evaluate the clustering performance using three challenging
unconstrained face datasets, including Celebrity in Frontal-Profile (CFP),
IARPA JANUS Benchmark A (IJB-A), and JANUS Challenge Set 3 (JANUS CS3)
datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach can
achieve significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, we
also show that the proposed clustering algorithm can be applied to curate a set
of large-scale and noisy training dataset while maintaining sufficient amount
of images and their variations due to nuisance factors. The face verification
performance on JANUS CS3 improves significantly by finetuning a DCNN model with
the curated MS-Celeb-1M dataset which contains over three million face images
Feature Representation for Online Signature Verification
Biometrics systems have been used in a wide range of applications and have
improved people authentication. Signature verification is one of the most
common biometric methods with techniques that employ various specifications of
a signature. Recently, deep learning has achieved great success in many fields,
such as image, sounds and text processing. In this paper, deep learning method
has been used for feature extraction and feature selection.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figures, Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information
Forensics and Securit
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