Login Authentication with Facial Gesture Recognition

Facial recognition has proven to be very useful and versatile, from Facebook photo tagging and Snapchat filters to modeling fluid dynamics and designing for augmented reality. However, facial recognition has only been used for user login services in conjunction with expensive and restrictive hardware technologies, such as in smart phone devices like the iPhone x. This project aims to apply machine learning techniques to reliably distinguish user accounts with only common cameras to make facial recognition logins more accessible to website and software developers. To show the feasibility of this idea, we created a web API that recognizes a users face to log them in to their account, and we will create a simple website to test the reliability of our system. In this paper, we discuss our database-centric architecture model, use cases and activity diagrams, technologies we used for the website, API, and machine learning algorithms. We also provide the screenshots of our system, the user manual, and our future plan

Background suppressing Gabor energy filtering

In the field of facial emotion recognition, early research advanced with the use of Gabor filters. However, these filters lack generalization and result in undesirably large feature vector size. In recent work, more attention has been given to other local appearance features. Two desired characteristics in a facial appearance feature are generalization capability, and the compactness of representation. In this paper, we propose a novel texture feature inspired by Gabor energy filters, called background suppressing Gabor energy filtering. The feature has a generalization component that removes background texture. It has a reduced feature vector size due to maximal representation and soft orientation histograms, and it is awhite box representation. We demonstrate improved performance on the non-trivial Audio/Visual Emotion Challenge 2012 grand-challenge dataset by a factor of 7.17 over the Gabor filter on the development set. We also demonstrate applicability of our approach beyond facial emotion recognition which yields improved classification rate over the Gabor filter for four bioimaging datasets by an average of 8.22%

Zapping index: Using smile to measure advertisement zapping likelihood

In marketing and advertising research, 'zapping' is defined as the action when a viewer stops watching a commercial. Researchers analyze users' behavior in order to prevent zapping which helps advertisers to design effective commercials. Since emotions can be used to engage consumers, in this paper, we leverage automated facial expression analysis to understand consumers' zapping behavior. Firstly, we provide an accurate moment-to-moment smile detection algorithm. Secondly, we formulate a binary classification problem (zapping/non-zapping) based on real-world scenarios, and adopt smile response as the feature to predict zapping. Thirdly, to cope with the lack of a metric in advertising evaluation, we propose a new metric called Zapping Index (ZI). ZI is a moment-to-moment measurement of a user's zapping probability. It gauges not only the reaction of a user, but also the preference of a user to commercials. Finally, extensive experiments are performed to provide insights and we make recommendations that will be useful to both advertisers and advertisement publishers