264 research outputs found
Active orientation models for face alignment in-the-wild
We present Active Orientation Models (AOMs), generative models of facial shape and appearance, which extend the well-known paradigm of Active Appearance Models (AAMs) for the case of generic face alignment under unconstrained conditions. Robustness stems from the fact that the proposed AOMs employ a statistically robust appearance model based on the principal components of image gradient orientations. We show that when incorporated within standard optimization frameworks for AAM learning and fitting, this kernel Principal Component Analysis results in robust algorithms for model fitting. At the same time, the resulting optimization problems maintain the same computational cost. As a result, the main similarity of AOMs with AAMs is the computational complexity. In particular, the project-out version of AOMs is as computationally efficient as the standard project-out inverse compositional algorithm, which is admittedly one of the fastest algorithms for fitting AAMs. We verify experimentally that: 1) AOMs generalize well to unseen variations and 2) outperform all other state-of-the-art AAM methods considered by a large margin. This performance improvement brings AOMs at least in par with other contemporary methods for face alignment. Finally, we provide MATLAB code at http://ibug.doc.ic.ac.uk/resources
Improving Facial Analysis and Performance Driven Animation through Disentangling Identity and Expression
We present techniques for improving performance driven facial animation,
emotion recognition, and facial key-point or landmark prediction using learned
identity invariant representations. Established approaches to these problems
can work well if sufficient examples and labels for a particular identity are
available and factors of variation are highly controlled. However, labeled
examples of facial expressions, emotions and key-points for new individuals are
difficult and costly to obtain. In this paper we improve the ability of
techniques to generalize to new and unseen individuals by explicitly modeling
previously seen variations related to identity and expression. We use a
weakly-supervised approach in which identity labels are used to learn the
different factors of variation linked to identity separately from factors
related to expression. We show how probabilistic modeling of these sources of
variation allows one to learn identity-invariant representations for
expressions which can then be used to identity-normalize various procedures for
facial expression analysis and animation control. We also show how to extend
the widely used techniques of active appearance models and constrained local
models through replacing the underlying point distribution models which are
typically constructed using principal component analysis with
identity-expression factorized representations. We present a wide variety of
experiments in which we consistently improve performance on emotion
recognition, markerless performance-driven facial animation and facial
key-point tracking.Comment: to appear in Image and Vision Computing Journal (IMAVIS
Investigating Spontaneous Facial Action Recognition through AAM Representations of the Face
The Facial Action Coding System (FACS) [Ekman et al., 2002] is the leading method for measuring facial movement in behavioral science. FACS has been successfully applied, but not limited to, identifying the differences between simulated and genuine pain, differences betweenwhen people are telling the truth versus lying, and differences between suicidal an
GAGAN: Geometry-Aware Generative Adversarial Networks
Deep generative models learned through adversarial training have become
increasingly popular for their ability to generate naturalistic image textures.
However, aside from their texture, the visual appearance of objects is
significantly influenced by their shape geometry; information which is not
taken into account by existing generative models. This paper introduces the
Geometry-Aware Generative Adversarial Networks (GAGAN) for incorporating
geometric information into the image generation process. Specifically, in GAGAN
the generator samples latent variables from the probability space of a
statistical shape model. By mapping the output of the generator to a canonical
coordinate frame through a differentiable geometric transformation, we enforce
the geometry of the objects and add an implicit connection from the prior to
the generated object. Experimental results on face generation indicate that the
GAGAN can generate realistic images of faces with arbitrary facial attributes
such as facial expression, pose, and morphology, that are of better quality
than current GAN-based methods. Our method can be used to augment any existing
GAN architecture and improve the quality of the images generated
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