Person Recognition in Personal Photo Collections

People nowadays share large parts of their personal lives through social media. Being able to automatically recognise people in personal photos may greatly enhance user convenience by easing photo album organisation. For human identification task, however, traditional focus of computer vision has been face recognition and pedestrian re-identification. Person recognition in social media photos sets new challenges for computer vision, including non-cooperative subjects (e.g. backward viewpoints, unusual poses) and great changes in appearance. To tackle this problem, we build a simple person recognition framework that leverages convnet features from multiple image regions (head, body, etc.). We propose new recognition scenarios that focus on the time and appearance gap between training and testing samples. We present an in-depth analysis of the importance of different features according to time and viewpoint generalisability. In the process, we verify that our simple approach achieves the state of the art result on the PIPA benchmark, arguably the largest social media based benchmark for person recognition to date with diverse poses, viewpoints, social groups, and events. Compared the conference version of the paper, this paper additionally presents (1) analysis of a face recogniser (DeepID2+), (2) new method naeil2 that combines the conference version method naeil and DeepID2+ to achieve state of the art results even compared to post-conference works, (3) discussion of related work since the conference version, (4) additional analysis including the head viewpoint-wise breakdown of performance, and (5) results on the open-world setup.Comment: 18 pages, 20 figures; to appear in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligenc

Multimodal Prediction and Personalization of Photo Edits with Deep Generative Models

Professional-grade software applications are powerful but complicated$-$expert users can achieve impressive results, but novices often struggle to complete even basic tasks. Photo editing is a prime example: after loading a photo, the user is confronted with an array of cryptic sliders like "clarity", "temp", and "highlights". An automatically generated suggestion could help, but there is no single "correct" edit for a given image$-$different experts may make very different aesthetic decisions when faced with the same image, and a single expert may make different choices depending on the intended use of the image (or on a whim). We therefore want a system that can propose multiple diverse, high-quality edits while also learning from and adapting to a user's aesthetic preferences. In this work, we develop a statistical model that meets these objectives. Our model builds on recent advances in neural network generative modeling and scalable inference, and uses hierarchical structure to learn editing patterns across many diverse users. Empirically, we find that our model outperforms other approaches on this challenging multimodal prediction task

Image captioning with weakly-supervised attention penalty

Stories are essential for genealogy research since they can help build emotional connections with people. A lot of family stories are reserved in historical photos and albums. Recent development on image captioning models makes it feasible to "tell stories" for photos automatically. The attention mechanism has been widely adopted in many state-of-the-art encoder-decoder based image captioning models, since it can bridge the gap between the visual part and the language part. Most existing captioning models implicitly trained attention modules with word-likelihood loss. Meanwhile, lots of studies have investigated intrinsic attentions for visual models using gradient-based approaches. Ideally, attention maps predicted by captioning models should be consistent with intrinsic attentions from visual models for any given visual concept. However, no work has been done to align implicitly learned attention maps with intrinsic visual attentions. In this paper, we proposed a novel model that measured consistency between captioning predicted attentions and intrinsic visual attentions. This alignment loss allows explicit attention correction without using any expensive bounding box annotations. We developed and evaluated our model on COCO dataset as well as a genealogical dataset from Ancestry.com Operations Inc., which contains billions of historical photos. The proposed model achieved better performances on all commonly used language evaluation metrics for both datasets.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figure

The Cross-Depiction Problem: Computer Vision Algorithms for Recognising Objects in Artwork and in Photographs

The cross-depiction problem is that of recognising visual objects regardless of whether they are photographed, painted, drawn, etc. It is a potentially significant yet under-researched problem. Emulating the remarkable human ability to recognise objects in an astonishingly wide variety of depictive forms is likely to advance both the foundations and the applications of Computer Vision. In this paper we benchmark classification, domain adaptation, and deep learning methods; demonstrating that none perform consistently well in the cross-depiction problem. Given the current interest in deep learning, the fact such methods exhibit the same behaviour as all but one other method: they show a significant fall in performance over inhomogeneous databases compared to their peak performance, which is always over data comprising photographs only. Rather, we find the methods that have strong models of spatial relations between parts tend to be more robust and therefore conclude that such information is important in modelling object classes regardless of appearance details.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figure

Merge or Not? Learning to Group Faces via Imitation Learning

Given a large number of unlabeled face images, face grouping aims at clustering the images into individual identities present in the data. This task remains a challenging problem despite the remarkable capability of deep learning approaches in learning face representation. In particular, grouping results can still be egregious given profile faces and a large number of uninteresting faces and noisy detections. Often, a user needs to correct the erroneous grouping manually. In this study, we formulate a novel face grouping framework that learns clustering strategy from ground-truth simulated behavior. This is achieved through imitation learning (a.k.a apprenticeship learning or learning by watching) via inverse reinforcement learning (IRL). In contrast to existing clustering approaches that group instances by similarity, our framework makes sequential decision to dynamically decide when to merge two face instances/groups driven by short- and long-term rewards. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that our framework outperforms unsupervised and supervised baselines

Dual-Glance Model for Deciphering Social Relationships

Since the beginning of early civilizations, social relationships derived from each individual fundamentally form the basis of social structure in our daily life. In the computer vision literature, much progress has been made in scene understanding, such as object detection and scene parsing. Recent research focuses on the relationship between objects based on its functionality and geometrical relations. In this work, we aim to study the problem of social relationship recognition, in still images. We have proposed a dual-glance model for social relationship recognition, where the first glance fixates at the individual pair of interest and the second glance deploys attention mechanism to explore contextual cues. We have also collected a new large scale People in Social Context (PISC) dataset, which comprises of 22,670 images and 76,568 annotated samples from 9 types of social relationship. We provide benchmark results on the PISC dataset, and qualitatively demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed model.Comment: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 201

Face Recognition: A Novel Multi-Level Taxonomy based Survey

In a world where security issues have been gaining growing importance, face recognition systems have attracted increasing attention in multiple application areas, ranging from forensics and surveillance to commerce and entertainment. To help understanding the landscape and abstraction levels relevant for face recognition systems, face recognition taxonomies allow a deeper dissection and comparison of the existing solutions. This paper proposes a new, more encompassing and richer multi-level face recognition taxonomy, facilitating the organization and categorization of available and emerging face recognition solutions; this taxonomy may also guide researchers in the development of more efficient face recognition solutions. The proposed multi-level taxonomy considers levels related to the face structure, feature support and feature extraction approach. Following the proposed taxonomy, a comprehensive survey of representative face recognition solutions is presented. The paper concludes with a discussion on current algorithmic and application related challenges which may define future research directions for face recognition.Comment: This paper is a preprint of a paper submitted to IET Biometrics. If accepted, the copy of record will be available at the IET Digital Librar

Learning Goal-Oriented Visual Dialog via Tempered Policy Gradient

Learning goal-oriented dialogues by means of deep reinforcement learning has recently become a popular research topic. However, commonly used policy-based dialogue agents often end up focusing on simple utterances and suboptimal policies. To mitigate this problem, we propose a class of novel temperature-based extensions for policy gradient methods, which are referred to as Tempered Policy Gradients (TPGs). On a recent AI-testbed, i.e., the GuessWhat?! game, we achieve significant improvements with two innovations. The first one is an extension of the state-of-the-art solutions with Seq2Seq and Memory Network structures that leads to an improvement of 7%. The second one is the application of our newly developed TPG methods, which improves the performance additionally by around 5% and, even more importantly, helps produce more convincing utterances.Comment: Published in IEEE Spoken Language Technology (SLT 2018), Athens, Greec

Generative Adversarial Networks: An Overview

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) provide a way to learn deep representations without extensively annotated training data. They achieve this through deriving backpropagation signals through a competitive process involving a pair of networks. The representations that can be learned by GANs may be used in a variety of applications, including image synthesis, semantic image editing, style transfer, image super-resolution and classification. The aim of this review paper is to provide an overview of GANs for the signal processing community, drawing on familiar analogies and concepts where possible. In addition to identifying different methods for training and constructing GANs, we also point to remaining challenges in their theory and application.Comment: Accepted in the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine Special Issue on Deep Learning for Visual Understandin

Multiple-Human Parsing in the Wild

Human parsing is attracting increasing research attention. In this work, we aim to push the frontier of human parsing by introducing the problem of multi-human parsing in the wild. Existing works on human parsing mainly tackle single-person scenarios, which deviates from real-world applications where multiple persons are present simultaneously with interaction and occlusion. To address the multi-human parsing problem, we introduce a new multi-human parsing (MHP) dataset and a novel multi-human parsing model named MH-Parser. The MHP dataset contains multiple persons captured in real-world scenes with pixel-level fine-grained semantic annotations in an instance-aware setting. The MH-Parser generates global parsing maps and person instance masks simultaneously in a bottom-up fashion with the help of a new Graph-GAN model. We envision that the MHP dataset will serve as a valuable data resource to develop new multi-human parsing models, and the MH-Parser offers a strong baseline to drive future research for multi-human parsing in the wild.Comment: The first two authors are with equal contributio