Motion deblurring of faces

Face analysis is a core part of computer vision, in which remarkable progress has been observed in the past decades. Current methods achieve recognition and tracking with invariance to fundamental modes of variation such as illumination, 3D pose, expressions. Notwithstanding, a much less standing mode of variation is motion deblurring, which however presents substantial challenges in face analysis. Recent approaches either make oversimplifying assumptions, e.g. in cases of joint optimization with other tasks, or fail to preserve the highly structured shape/identity information. Therefore, we propose a data-driven method that encourages identity preservation. The proposed model includes two parallel streams (sub-networks): the first deblurs the image, the second implicitly extracts and projects the identity of both the sharp and the blurred image in similar subspaces. We devise a method for creating realistic motion blur by averaging a variable number of frames to train our model. The averaged images originate from a 2MF2 dataset with 10 million facial frames, which we introduce for the task. Considering deblurring as an intermediate step, we utilize the deblurred outputs to conduct a thorough experimentation on high-level face analysis tasks, i.e. landmark localization and face verification. The experimental evaluation demonstrates the superiority of our method

UG^2: a Video Benchmark for Assessing the Impact of Image Restoration and Enhancement on Automatic Visual Recognition

Advances in image restoration and enhancement techniques have led to discussion about how such algorithmscan be applied as a pre-processing step to improve automatic visual recognition. In principle, techniques like deblurring and super-resolution should yield improvements by de-emphasizing noise and increasing signal in an input image. But the historically divergent goals of the computational photography and visual recognition communities have created a significant need for more work in this direction. To facilitate new research, we introduce a new benchmark dataset called UG^2, which contains three difficult real-world scenarios: uncontrolled videos taken by UAVs and manned gliders, as well as controlled videos taken on the ground. Over 160,000 annotated frames forhundreds of ImageNet classes are available, which are used for baseline experiments that assess the impact of known and unknown image artifacts and other conditions on common deep learning-based object classification approaches. Further, current image restoration and enhancement techniques are evaluated by determining whether or not theyimprove baseline classification performance. Results showthat there is plenty of room for algorithmic innovation, making this dataset a useful tool going forward.Comment: Supplemental material: https://goo.gl/vVM1xe, Dataset: https://goo.gl/AjA6En, CVPR 2018 Prize Challenge: ug2challenge.or