8,541 research outputs found
Recovering facial shape using a statistical model of surface normal direction
In this paper, we show how a statistical model of facial shape can be embedded within a shape-from-shading algorithm. We describe how facial shape can be captured using a statistical model of variations in surface normal direction. To construct this model, we make use of the azimuthal equidistant projection to map the distribution of surface normals from the polar representation on a unit sphere to Cartesian points on a local tangent plane. The distribution of surface normal directions is captured using the covariance matrix for the projected point positions. The eigenvectors of the covariance matrix define the modes of shape-variation in the fields of transformed surface normals. We show how this model can be trained using surface normal data acquired from range images and how to fit the model to intensity images of faces using constraints on the surface normal direction provided by Lambert's law. We demonstrate that the combination of a global statistical constraint and local irradiance constraint yields an efficient and accurate approach to facial shape recovery and is capable of recovering fine local surface details. We assess the accuracy of the technique on a variety of images with ground truth and real-world images
Empirical mode decomposition-based facial pose estimation inside video sequences
We describe a new pose-estimation algorithm via integration of the strength in both empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and mutual information. While mutual information is exploited to measure the similarity between facial images to estimate poses, EMD is exploited to decompose input facial images into a number of intrinsic mode function (IMF) components, which redistribute the effect of noise, expression changes, and illumination variations as such that, when the input facial image is described by the selected IMF components, all the negative effects can be minimized. Extensive experiments were carried out in comparisons to existing representative techniques, and the results show that the proposed algorithm achieves better pose-estimation performances with robustness to noise corruption, illumination variation, and facial expressions
Infrared face recognition: a comprehensive review of methodologies and databases
Automatic face recognition is an area with immense practical potential which
includes a wide range of commercial and law enforcement applications. Hence it
is unsurprising that it continues to be one of the most active research areas
of computer vision. Even after over three decades of intense research, the
state-of-the-art in face recognition continues to improve, benefitting from
advances in a range of different research fields such as image processing,
pattern recognition, computer graphics, and physiology. Systems based on
visible spectrum images, the most researched face recognition modality, have
reached a significant level of maturity with some practical success. However,
they continue to face challenges in the presence of illumination, pose and
expression changes, as well as facial disguises, all of which can significantly
decrease recognition accuracy. Amongst various approaches which have been
proposed in an attempt to overcome these limitations, the use of infrared (IR)
imaging has emerged as a particularly promising research direction. This paper
presents a comprehensive and timely review of the literature on this subject.
Our key contributions are: (i) a summary of the inherent properties of infrared
imaging which makes this modality promising in the context of face recognition,
(ii) a systematic review of the most influential approaches, with a focus on
emerging common trends as well as key differences between alternative
methodologies, (iii) a description of the main databases of infrared facial
images available to the researcher, and lastly (iv) a discussion of the most
promising avenues for future research.Comment: Pattern Recognition, 2014. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap
with arXiv:1306.160
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