Real-time face view correction for front-facing cameras

Face view is particularly important in person-to-person communication. Disparity between the camera location and the face orientation can result in undesirable facial appearances of the participants during video conferencing. This phenomenon becomes particularly notable on devices where the front-facing camera is placed at unconventional locations such as below the display or within the keyboard. In this paper, we takes the video stream from a single RGB camera as input, and generates a video stream that emulates the view from a virtual camera at a designated location. The most challenging issue of this problem is that the corrected view often needs out-of-plane head rotations. To address this challenge, we reconstruct 3D face shape and re-render it into synthesized frames according to the virtual camera location. To output the corrected video stream with natural appearance in real-time, we propose several novel techniques including accurate eyebrow reconstruction, high-quality blending between corrected face image and background, and a template-based 3D reconstruction of glasses. Our system works well for different lighting conditions and skin tones, and is able to handle users wearing glasses. Extensive experiments and user studies demonstrate that our proposed method can achieve high-quality results

Metric representations for shape analysis and synthesis

2D and 3D geometric shapes are ubiquitous in computer graphics, computer animation, and computer-aided design and manufacturing. Two of the fundamental research challenges that underline these applications are the analysis and synthesis of shapes, with the former aiming to extract semantically meaningful knowledge of shapes and the latter focusing on generating plausible-looking shapes based on user inputs. Traditionally, shape analysis and synthesis are based on representations such as meshes, parameterisations, and Laplacians, which lead to mostly hand-crafted computation rules that are either suboptimal or treat related tasks separately. In this work, we propose to represent a 2D/3D shape as a square symmetric matrix that correlates every pair of geometric points on the shape, which allows us to formulate shape analysis and synthesis problems as principled optimisation problems that can be globally optimised. To demonstrate the usefulness of our new metric representation for shape analysis, we first address 3D mesh saliency detection by representing a shape as a pairwise feature distance matrix, whose principal eigenvector is experimentally shown to outperform the traditional saliency detection rules for capturing ground truth saliency annotations. Following this work, we then unify saliency detection and nonrigid shape matching via a jointly learned metric representation, which is shown to improve the accuracy of both tasks on the existing saliency detection and shape matching benchmarks. To also demonstrate the usefulness of our metric representation for shape synthesis, we address 2D facial shape beautification in images by representing a facial shape as the orthogonal projection matrix onto 2D facial landmarks, which is shown to improve the attractiveness of both frontal-neutral and non-frontal-non-neutral faces in the user studies. Finally, we show that adversarially learning the distributions of human shapes and poses in a hidden space produces higher quality human samples than in the geometry space. Together, these results show that our metric representation benefits both the analysis and synthesis of shapes, with the potential of unifying more diverse tasks such as part segmentation and labelling in the future work

Metaphysics and the Moving Image

The various forms of cross-pollination and encounter between film and philosophy have generated thought experiments which make it possible to think beyond what the two fields can do for each other to what they can do together. My guiding intuition in this thesis is that the distinct historical evolutions of film and philosophy intersect in the speculative domain of the Western metaphysical paradigm, as the film medium technologically and aesthetically reestablishes conditions for “truth” within a contemporary intellectual climate which is often described as politically “post-truth.” As the long age of metaphysics comes to a close at the turn of the 19th century, ushered in by Nietzsche’s bold declaration “God is dead” and subjected thereafter to standardized modes of critique from both continental and analytical philosophic traditions, I explore how the emergence of film at this time and its representation of what André Bazin calls “the world in its own image” marks a migration of metaphysics from rational speculation through concepts to mechanical revelation through images and sounds. The rebirth of the world in its own image in the wake of the death of God is the self-affirmation of life and marks the first principle of a new "cine-metaphysics." I take seriously what appears as a mere historical coincidence (claiming that it is not a coincidence) and seek to analyze its implications for film-philosophy. With the birth of film following the death of God, I suggest that the world’s radical exposure and dramatic appearance onscreen and on its own terms, as it were, constitutes the basis not just for a continuation or return but rather a transformation of the philosophical tradition of metaphysics, rendering metaphysics “physical” and yielding a series of ontologically perspicuous figures of cinematic space-time brought to light by various aesthetic incarnations of the world in its own image. Through both theoretical and hermeneutic investigations into the metaphysical legacy of the moving image, one of my main conclusions is that in philosophy metaphysical thinking tends to result in conceptual abstraction or confusion, or is at least accused of such results, whereas cinema, conceived of as enacting the very object of metaphysical thought, can bring about the audiovisual clarity of the everyday

A Quarter-Century of Normalization and Social Role Valorization

During the late 1960s, Normalization and Social Role Valorization (SRV) enabled the widespread emergence of community residential options and then provided the philosophical climate within which educational integration, supported employment, and community participation were able to take firm root. This book is unique in tracing the evolution and impact of Normalization and SRV over the last quarter-century, with many of the chapter authors personally involved in a still-evolving international movement