Robust RGB-D Face Recognition Using Attribute-Aware Loss

Existing convolutional neural network (CNN) based face recognition algorithms typically learn a discriminative feature mapping, using a loss function that enforces separation of features from different classes and/or aggregation of features within the same class. However, they may suffer from bias in the training data such as uneven sampling density, because they optimize the adjacency relationship of the learned features without considering the proximity of the underlying faces. Moreover, since they only use facial images for training, the learned feature mapping may not correctly indicate the relationship of other attributes such as gender and ethnicity, which can be important for some face recognition applications. In this paper, we propose a new CNN-based face recognition approach that incorporates such attributes into the training process. Using an attribute-aware loss function that regularizes the feature mapping using attribute proximity, our approach learns more discriminative features that are correlated with the attributes. We train our face recognition model on a large-scale RGB-D data set with over 100K identities captured under real application conditions. By comparing our approach with other methods on a variety of experiments, we demonstrate that depth channel and attribute-aware loss greatly improve the accuracy and robustness of face recognition

Deep Sketch-Photo Face Recognition Assisted by Facial Attributes

In this paper, we present a deep coupled framework to address the problem of matching sketch image against a gallery of mugshots. Face sketches have the essential in- formation about the spatial topology and geometric details of faces while missing some important facial attributes such as ethnicity, hair, eye, and skin color. We propose a cou- pled deep neural network architecture which utilizes facial attributes in order to improve the sketch-photo recognition performance. The proposed Attribute-Assisted Deep Con- volutional Neural Network (AADCNN) method exploits the facial attributes and leverages the loss functions from the facial attributes identification and face verification tasks in order to learn rich discriminative features in a common em- bedding subspace. The facial attribute identification task increases the inter-personal variations by pushing apart the embedded features extracted from individuals with differ- ent facial attributes, while the verification task reduces the intra-personal variations by pulling together all the fea- tures that are related to one person. The learned discrim- inative features can be well generalized to new identities not seen in the training data. The proposed architecture is able to make full use of the sketch and complementary fa- cial attribute information to train a deep model compared to the conventional sketch-photo recognition methods. Exten- sive experiments are performed on composite (E-PRIP) and semi-forensic (IIIT-D semi-forensic) datasets. The results show the superiority of our method compared to the state- of-the-art models in sketch-photo recognition algorithm

Looking Beyond Appearances: Synthetic Training Data for Deep CNNs in Re-identification

Re-identification is generally carried out by encoding the appearance of a subject in terms of outfit, suggesting scenarios where people do not change their attire. In this paper we overcome this restriction, by proposing a framework based on a deep convolutional neural network, SOMAnet, that additionally models other discriminative aspects, namely, structural attributes of the human figure (e.g. height, obesity, gender). Our method is unique in many respects. First, SOMAnet is based on the Inception architecture, departing from the usual siamese framework. This spares expensive data preparation (pairing images across cameras) and allows the understanding of what the network learned. Second, and most notably, the training data consists of a synthetic 100K instance dataset, SOMAset, created by photorealistic human body generation software. Synthetic data represents a good compromise between realistic imagery, usually not required in re-identification since surveillance cameras capture low-resolution silhouettes, and complete control of the samples, which is useful in order to customize the data w.r.t. the surveillance scenario at-hand, e.g. ethnicity. SOMAnet, trained on SOMAset and fine-tuned on recent re-identification benchmarks, outperforms all competitors, matching subjects even with different apparel. The combination of synthetic data with Inception architectures opens up new research avenues in re-identification.Comment: 14 page

Seeing Voices and Hearing Faces: Cross-modal biometric matching

We introduce a seemingly impossible task: given only an audio clip of someone speaking, decide which of two face images is the speaker. In this paper we study this, and a number of related cross-modal tasks, aimed at answering the question: how much can we infer from the voice about the face and vice versa? We study this task "in the wild", employing the datasets that are now publicly available for face recognition from static images (VGGFace) and speaker identification from audio (VoxCeleb). These provide training and testing scenarios for both static and dynamic testing of cross-modal matching. We make the following contributions: (i) we introduce CNN architectures for both binary and multi-way cross-modal face and audio matching, (ii) we compare dynamic testing (where video information is available, but the audio is not from the same video) with static testing (where only a single still image is available), and (iii) we use human testing as a baseline to calibrate the difficulty of the task. We show that a CNN can indeed be trained to solve this task in both the static and dynamic scenarios, and is even well above chance on 10-way classification of the face given the voice. The CNN matches human performance on easy examples (e.g. different gender across faces) but exceeds human performance on more challenging examples (e.g. faces with the same gender, age and nationality).Comment: To appear in: IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 201

RGB-D datasets using microsoft kinect or similar sensors: a survey

RGB-D data has turned out to be a very useful representation of an indoor scene for solving fundamental computer vision problems. It takes the advantages of the color image that provides appearance information of an object and also the depth image that is immune to the variations in color, illumination, rotation angle and scale. With the invention of the low-cost Microsoft Kinect sensor, which was initially used for gaming and later became a popular device for computer vision, high quality RGB-D data can be acquired easily. In recent years, more and more RGB-D image/video datasets dedicated to various applications have become available, which are of great importance to benchmark the state-of-the-art. In this paper, we systematically survey popular RGB-D datasets for different applications including object recognition, scene classification, hand gesture recognition, 3D-simultaneous localization and mapping, and pose estimation. We provide the insights into the characteristics of each important dataset, and compare the popularity and the difficulty of those datasets. Overall, the main goal of this survey is to give a comprehensive description about the available RGB-D datasets and thus to guide researchers in the selection of suitable datasets for evaluating their algorithms

Deep Learning Architectures for Heterogeneous Face Recognition

Face recognition has been one of the most challenging areas of research in biometrics and computer vision. Many face recognition algorithms are designed to address illumination and pose problems for visible face images. In recent years, there has been significant amount of research in Heterogeneous Face Recognition (HFR). The large modality gap between faces captured in different spectrum as well as lack of training data makes heterogeneous face recognition (HFR) quite a challenging problem. In this work, we present different deep learning frameworks to address the problem of matching non-visible face photos against a gallery of visible faces. Algorithms for thermal-to-visible face recognition can be categorized as cross-spectrum feature-based methods, or cross-spectrum image synthesis methods. In cross-spectrum feature-based face recognition a thermal probe is matched against a gallery of visible faces corresponding to the real-world scenario, in a feature subspace. The second category synthesizes a visible-like image from a thermal image which can then be used by any commercial visible spectrum face recognition system. These methods also beneficial in the sense that the synthesized visible face image can be directly utilized by existing face recognition systems which operate only on the visible face imagery. Therefore, using this approach one can leverage the existing commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) and government-off-the-shelf (GOTS) solutions. In addition, the synthesized images can be used by human examiners for different purposes. There are some informative traits, such as age, gender, ethnicity, race, and hair color, which are not distinctive enough for the sake of recognition, but still can act as complementary information to other primary information, such as face and fingerprint. These traits, which are known as soft biometrics, can improve recognition algorithms while they are much cheaper and faster to acquire. They can be directly used in a unimodal system for some applications. Usually, soft biometric traits have been utilized jointly with hard biometrics (face photo) for different tasks in the sense that they are considered to be available both during the training and testing phases. In our approaches we look at this problem in a different way. We consider the case when soft biometric information does not exist during the testing phase, and our method can predict them directly in a multi-tasking paradigm. There are situations in which training data might come equipped with additional information that can be modeled as an auxiliary view of the data, and that unfortunately is not available during testing. This is the LUPI scenario. We introduce a novel framework based on deep learning techniques that leverages the auxiliary view to improve the performance of recognition system. We do so by introducing a formulation that is general, in the sense that can be used with any visual classifier. Every use of auxiliary information has been validated extensively using publicly available benchmark datasets, and several new state-of-the-art accuracy performance values have been set. Examples of application domains include visual object recognition from RGB images and from depth data, handwritten digit recognition, and gesture recognition from video. We also design a novel aggregation framework which optimizes the landmark locations directly using only one image without requiring any extra prior which leads to robust alignment given arbitrary face deformations. Three different approaches are employed to generate the manipulated faces and two of them perform the manipulation via the adversarial attacks to fool a face recognizer. This step can decouple from our framework and potentially used to enhance other landmark detectors. Aggregation of the manipulated faces in different branches of proposed method leads to robust landmark detection. Finally we focus on the generative adversarial networks which is a very powerful tool in synthesizing a visible-like images from the non-visible images. The main goal of a generative model is to approximate the true data distribution which is not known. In general, the choice for modeling the density function is challenging. Explicit models have the advantage of explicitly calculating the probability densities. There are two well-known implicit approaches, namely the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) and Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) which try to model the data distribution implicitly. The VAEs try to maximize the data likelihood lower bound, while a GAN performs a minimax game between two players during its optimization. GANs overlook the explicit data density characteristics which leads to undesirable quantitative evaluations and mode collapse. This causes the generator to create similar looking images with poor diversity of samples. In the last chapter of thesis, we focus to address this issue in GANs framework

From clothing to identity; manual and automatic soft biometrics

Soft biometrics have increasingly attracted research interest and are often considered as major cues for identity, especially in the absence of valid traditional biometrics, as in surveillance. In everyday life, several incidents and forensic scenarios highlight the usefulness and capability of identity information that can be deduced from clothing. Semantic clothing attributes have recently been introduced as a new form of soft biometrics. Although clothing traits can be naturally described and compared by humans for operable and successful use, it is desirable to exploit computer-vision to enrich clothing descriptions with more objective and discriminative information. This allows automatic extraction and semantic description and comparison of visually detectable clothing traits in a manner similar to recognition by eyewitness statements. This study proposes a novel set of soft clothing attributes, described using small groups of high-level semantic labels, and automatically extracted using computer-vision techniques. In this way we can explore the capability of human attributes vis-a-vis those which are inferred automatically by computer-vision. Categorical and comparative soft clothing traits are derived and used for identification/re identification either to supplement soft body traits or to be used alone. The automatically- and manually-derived soft clothing biometrics are employed in challenging invariant person retrieval. The experimental results highlight promising potential for use in various applications