Deformable face ensemble alignment with robust grouped-L1 anchors

Many methods exist at the moment for deformable face fitting. A drawback to nearly all these approaches is that they are (i) noisy in terms of landmark positions, and (ii) the noise is biased across frames (i.e. the misalignment is toward common directions across all frames). In this paper we propose a grouped $\mathcal{L}1$-norm anchored method for simultaneously aligning an ensemble of deformable face images stemming from the same subject, given noisy heterogeneous landmark estimates. Impressive alignment performance improvement and refinement is obtained using very weak initialization as "anchors"

On Face Segmentation, Face Swapping, and Face Perception

We show that even when face images are unconstrained and arbitrarily paired, face swapping between them is actually quite simple. To this end, we make the following contributions. (a) Instead of tailoring systems for face segmentation, as others previously proposed, we show that a standard fully convolutional network (FCN) can achieve remarkably fast and accurate segmentations, provided that it is trained on a rich enough example set. For this purpose, we describe novel data collection and generation routines which provide challenging segmented face examples. (b) We use our segmentations to enable robust face swapping under unprecedented conditions. (c) Unlike previous work, our swapping is robust enough to allow for extensive quantitative tests. To this end, we use the Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) benchmark and measure the effect of intra- and inter-subject face swapping on recognition. We show that our intra-subject swapped faces remain as recognizable as their sources, testifying to the effectiveness of our method. In line with well known perceptual studies, we show that better face swapping produces less recognizable inter-subject results. This is the first time this effect was quantitatively demonstrated for machine vision systems

PANDA: Pose Aligned Networks for Deep Attribute Modeling

We propose a method for inferring human attributes (such as gender, hair style, clothes style, expression, action) from images of people under large variation of viewpoint, pose, appearance, articulation and occlusion. Convolutional Neural Nets (CNN) have been shown to perform very well on large scale object recognition problems. In the context of attribute classification, however, the signal is often subtle and it may cover only a small part of the image, while the image is dominated by the effects of pose and viewpoint. Discounting for pose variation would require training on very large labeled datasets which are not presently available. Part-based models, such as poselets and DPM have been shown to perform well for this problem but they are limited by shallow low-level features. We propose a new method which combines part-based models and deep learning by training pose-normalized CNNs. We show substantial improvement vs. state-of-the-art methods on challenging attribute classification tasks in unconstrained settings. Experiments confirm that our method outperforms both the best part-based methods on this problem and conventional CNNs trained on the full bounding box of the person.Comment: 8 page

Who am I talking with? A face memory for social robots

In order to provide personalized services and to develop human-like interaction capabilities robots need to rec- ognize their human partner. Face recognition has been studied in the past decade exhaustively in the context of security systems and with significant progress on huge datasets. However, these capabilities are not in focus when it comes to social interaction situations. Humans are able to remember people seen for a short moment in time and apply this knowledge directly in their engagement in conversation. In order to equip a robot with capabilities to recall human interlocutors and to provide user- aware services, we adopt human-human interaction schemes to propose a face memory on the basis of active appearance models integrated with the active memory architecture. This paper presents the concept of the interactive face memory, the applied recognition algorithms, and their embedding into the robot’s system architecture. Performance measures are discussed for general face databases as well as scenario-specific datasets