Human Face Recognition

Face recognition, as the main biometric used by human beings, has become more popular for the last twenty years. Automatic recognition of human faces has many commercial and security applications in identity validation and recognition and has become one of the hottest topics in the area of image processing and pattern recognition since 1990. Availability of feasible technologies as well as the increasing request for reliable security systems in today’s world has been a motivation for many researchers to develop new methods for face recognition. In automatic face recognition we desire to either identify or verify one or more persons in still or video images of a scene by means of a stored database of faces. One of the important features of face recognition is its non-intrusive and non-contact property that distinguishes it from other biometrics like iris or finger print recognition that require subjects’ participation. During the last two decades several face recognition algorithms and systems have been proposed and some major advances have been achieved. As a result, the performance of face recognition systems under controlled conditions has now reached a satisfactory level. These systems, however, face some challenges in environments with variations in illumination, pose, expression, etc. The objective of this research is designing a reliable automated face recognition system which is robust under varying conditions of noise level, illumination and occlusion. A new method for illumination invariant feature extraction based on the illumination-reflectance model is proposed which is computationally efficient and does not require any prior information about the face model or illumination. A weighted voting scheme is also proposed to enhance the performance under illumination variations and also cancel occlusions. The proposed method uses mutual information and entropy of the images to generate different weights for a group of ensemble classifiers based on the input image quality. The method yields outstanding results by reducing the effect of both illumination and occlusion variations in the input face images

Robust Face Alignment for Illumination and Pose Invariant Face Recognition

In building a face recognition system for real-life scenarios, one usually faces the problem that is the selection of a feature-space and preprocessing methods such as alignment under varying illumination conditions and poses. In this study, we developed a robust face alignment approach based on Active Appearance Model (AAM) by inserting an illumination normalization module into the standard AAM searching procedure and inserting different poses of the same identity into the training set. The modified AAM search can now handle both illumination and pose variations in the same epoch, hence it provides better convergence in both point-to-point and point-to-curve senses. We also investigate how face recognition performance is affected by the selection of feature space as well as the proposed alignment method. The experimental results show that the combined pose alignment and illumination normalization methods increase the recognition rates considerably for all featurespaces. 1

Scale-space and wavelet decomposition based scheme for face recognition using nearest linear combination.

Face recognition has attracted much attention from Artificial Intelligence researchers due to its wide acceptability in many applications. Many techniques have been suggested to develop a practical face recognition system that has the ability to handle different challenges. Illumination variation is one of the major issues that significantly affects the performances of face recognition systems. Among many illumination robust approaches, scale-space decomposition based methods play an important role in reducing the lighting effects in facial images. This research presents a face recognition approach for utilizing both the scale-space decomposition and wavelet decomposition methods. In most cases, the existing scale-space decomposition methods perform recognition, based on only the illumination-invariant small-scale features. The proposed approach uses both large-scale and small-scale features through scale-space decomposition and wavelet decomposition. Together with the Nearest Linear Combination (NLC) approach, the proposed system is validated on different databases. The experimental results have shown that the system outperforms many recognition methods in the same category. --Leaf ii.The original print copy of this thesis may be available here: http://wizard.unbc.ca/record=b194710

Pattern Recognition

Pattern recognition is a very wide research field. It involves factors as diverse as sensors, feature extraction, pattern classification, decision fusion, applications and others. The signals processed are commonly one, two or three dimensional, the processing is done in real- time or takes hours and days, some systems look for one narrow object class, others search huge databases for entries with at least a small amount of similarity. No single person can claim expertise across the whole field, which develops rapidly, updates its paradigms and comprehends several philosophical approaches. This book reflects this diversity by presenting a selection of recent developments within the area of pattern recognition and related fields. It covers theoretical advances in classification and feature extraction as well as application-oriented works. Authors of these 25 works present and advocate recent achievements of their research related to the field of pattern recognition

Facial expression recognition in the wild : from individual to group

The progress in computing technology has increased the demand for smart systems capable of understanding human affect and emotional manifestations. One of the crucial factors in designing systems equipped with such intelligence is to have accurate automatic Facial Expression Recognition (FER) methods. In computer vision, automatic facial expression analysis is an active field of research for over two decades now. However, there are still a lot of questions unanswered. The research presented in this thesis attempts to address some of the key issues of FER in challenging conditions mentioned as follows: 1) creating a facial expressions database representing real-world conditions; 2) devising Head Pose Normalisation (HPN) methods which are independent of facial parts location; 3) creating automatic methods for the analysis of mood of group of people. The central hypothesis of the thesis is that extracting close to real-world data from movies and performing facial expression analysis on movies is a stepping stone in the direction of moving the analysis of faces towards real-world, unconstrained condition. A temporal facial expressions database, Acted Facial Expressions in the Wild (AFEW) is proposed. The database is constructed and labelled using a semi-automatic process based on closed caption subtitle based keyword search. Currently, AFEW is the largest facial expressions database representing challenging conditions available to the research community. For providing a common platform to researchers in order to evaluate and extend their state-of-the-art FER methods, the first Emotion Recognition in the Wild (EmotiW) challenge based on AFEW is proposed. An image-only based facial expressions database Static Facial Expressions In The Wild (SFEW) extracted from AFEW is proposed. Furthermore, the thesis focuses on HPN for real-world images. Earlier methods were based on fiducial points. However, as fiducial points detection is an open problem for real-world images, HPN can be error-prone. A HPN method based on response maps generated from part-detectors is proposed. The proposed shape-constrained method does not require fiducial points and head pose information, which makes it suitable for real-world images. Data from movies and the internet, representing real-world conditions poses another major challenge of the presence of multiple subjects to the research community. This defines another focus of this thesis where a novel approach for modeling the perception of mood of a group of people in an image is presented. A new database is constructed from Flickr based on keywords related to social events. Three models are proposed: averaging based Group Expression Model (GEM), Weighted Group Expression Model (GEM_w) and Augmented Group Expression Model (GEM_LDA). GEM_w is based on social contextual attributes, which are used as weights on each person's contribution towards the overall group's mood. Further, GEM_LDA is based on topic model and feature augmentation. The proposed framework is applied to applications of group candid shot selection and event summarisation. The application of Structural SIMilarity (SSIM) index metric is explored for finding similar facial expressions. The proposed framework is applied to the problem of creating image albums based on facial expressions, finding corresponding expressions for training facial performance transfer algorithms

Towards multi-modal face recognition in the wild

Face recognition aims at utilizing the facial appearance for the identification or verification of human individuals, and has been one of the fundamental research areas in computer vision. Over the past a few decades, face recognition has drawn significant attention due to its potential use in biometric authentication, surveillance, security, robotics and so on. Many existing face recognition methods are evaluated with faces collected in labs, and does not generalize well in reality. Compared with faces captured in labs, faces in the wild are inherently multi-modal distributed. The multi-modality issue leads to significant intra-class variations, and usually requires a large amount of labeled samples to cover the wide range of modalities. These difficulties make unconstrained face recognition even more challenging, and pose a considerable gap between laboratorial research and industrial practice. To bridge the gap, we set focus on multi-modal face recognition in the unconstrained environment in this thesis. This thesis introduces several approaches to address the aforementioned specific challenges. Accordingly, the approaches included can be generally categorized into two research directions. The first direction explores a series of deep learning based methods in handling the large intra-class variations in multi-modal face recognition. The combination of modalities in the wild is unpredictable, and thus is difficult to explicitly define in advance. It is desirable to design a framework adaptive to the modality-driven variations in the specific scenarios. To this end, Deep Neural Network (DNN) is adopted as the basis, as DNN learns the feature representation and the classifier with reference to the specific target objective directly. To begin with, we aims to learn a part-based facial representation with deep neural networks to address face verification in the wild. In particular, the proposed framework consists of two deliberate components: a Deep Mixture Model (DMM) to find accurate patch correspondence and a Convolutional Fusion Network (CFN) to learn the fusion of multiple patch-specific facial features. This framework is specifically designed to handle local distortions caused by modalities such as pose and illumination. The next work introduces the conditional partition of the sample space into deep learning to tackle face recognition with regard to modalities in a general sense. Without any prior knowledge of modality, the proposed network learns the hidden modalities of faces, based on which the initial sample space is partitioned so that modality-specific feature representation can be learnt accordingly. The other direction is Semi-Supervised Learning with videos to tackle the deficiency of labeled training samples. In particular, a novel Semi-Supervised Learning strategy is proposed for the problem of celebrity identification by harvesting the “confident” unlabeled samples from the vast video sources. The video context information is adopted to iteratively enrich the diversity of the initial labeled set so that the performance of learnt classifier can be gradually improved. In this thesis, all these works are evaluated with extensive experiments in the corresponding sections. The connection and difference among the three approaches are further discussed in the conclusion section.Open Acces

Face Image Retrieval with Landmark Detection and Semantic Concepts Extraction

This thesis proposes various novel approaches for improving the performances of automatic facial landmarks detection system based on the concept of pictorial tree structure model. Furthermore, a robust glasses landmark detection system is also proposed as glasses are commonly used. These proposed approaches are employed to develop an automatic semantic based face images retrieval system. The experiment results demonstrate significant improvements of all the proposed approaches towards accuracy and efficiency

Recent Advances in Signal Processing

The signal processing task is a very critical issue in the majority of new technological inventions and challenges in a variety of applications in both science and engineering fields. Classical signal processing techniques have largely worked with mathematical models that are linear, local, stationary, and Gaussian. They have always favored closed-form tractability over real-world accuracy. These constraints were imposed by the lack of powerful computing tools. During the last few decades, signal processing theories, developments, and applications have matured rapidly and now include tools from many areas of mathematics, computer science, physics, and engineering. This book is targeted primarily toward both students and researchers who want to be exposed to a wide variety of signal processing techniques and algorithms. It includes 27 chapters that can be categorized into five different areas depending on the application at hand. These five categories are ordered to address image processing, speech processing, communication systems, time-series analysis, and educational packages respectively. The book has the advantage of providing a collection of applications that are completely independent and self-contained; thus, the interested reader can choose any chapter and skip to another without losing continuity