Geometry-Aware Face Completion and Editing

Face completion is a challenging generation task because it requires generating visually pleasing new pixels that are semantically consistent with the unmasked face region. This paper proposes a geometry-aware Face Completion and Editing NETwork (FCENet) by systematically studying facial geometry from the unmasked region. Firstly, a facial geometry estimator is learned to estimate facial landmark heatmaps and parsing maps from the unmasked face image. Then, an encoder-decoder structure generator serves to complete a face image and disentangle its mask areas conditioned on both the masked face image and the estimated facial geometry images. Besides, since low-rank property exists in manually labeled masks, a low-rank regularization term is imposed on the disentangled masks, enforcing our completion network to manage occlusion area with various shape and size. Furthermore, our network can generate diverse results from the same masked input by modifying estimated facial geometry, which provides a flexible mean to edit the completed face appearance. Extensive experimental results qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrate that our network is able to generate visually pleasing face completion results and edit face attributes as well

Deep learning for small object detection

Small object detection has become increasingly relevant due to the fact that the performance of common object detectors falls significantly as objects become smaller. Many computer vision applications require the analysis of the entire set of objects in the image, including extremely small objects. Moreover, the detection of small objects allows to perceive objects at a greater distance, thus giving more time to adapt to any situation or unforeseen event

Exploiting Spatio-Temporal Coherence for Video Object Detection in Robotics

This paper proposes a method to enhance video object detection for indoor environments in robotics. Concretely, it exploits knowledge about the camera motion between frames to propagate previously detected objects to successive frames. The proposal is rooted in the concepts of planar homography to propose regions of interest where to find objects, and recursive Bayesian filtering to integrate observations over time. The proposal is evaluated on six virtual, indoor environments, accounting for the detection of nine object classes over a total of ∼ 7k frames. Results show that our proposal improves the recall and the F1-score by a factor of 1.41 and 1.27, respectively, as well as it achieves a significant reduction of the object categorization entropy (58.8%) when compared to a two-stage video object detection method used as baseline, at the cost of small time overheads (120 ms) and precision loss (0.92).</p

Face Anti-Spoofing and Deep Learning Based Unsupervised Image Recognition Systems

One of the main problems of a supervised deep learning approach is that it requires large amounts of labeled training data, which are not always easily available. This PhD dissertation addresses the above-mentioned problem by using a novel unsupervised deep learning face verification system called UFace, that does not require labeled training data as it automatically, in an unsupervised way, generates training data from even a relatively small size of data. The method starts by selecting, in unsupervised way, k-most similar and k-most dissimilar images for a given face image. Moreover, this PhD dissertation proposes a new loss function to make it work with the proposed method. Specifically, the method computes loss function k times for both similar and dissimilar images for each input image in order to increase the discriminative power of feature vectors to learn the inter-class and intra-class face variability. The training is carried out based on the similar and dissimilar input face image vector rather than the same training input face image vector in order to extract face embeddings. The UFace is evaluated on four benchmark face verification datasets: Labeled Faces in the Wild dataset (LFW), YouTube Faces dataset (YTF), Cross-age LFW (CALFW) and Celebrities in Frontal Profile in the Wild (CFP-FP) datasets. The results show that we gain an accuracy of 99.40\%, 96.04\%, 95.12\% and 97.89\% respectively. The achieved results, despite being unsupervised, is on par to a similar but fully supervised methods. Another, related to face verification, area of research is on face anti-spoofing systems. State-of-the-art face anti-spoofing systems use either deep learning, or manually extracted image quality features. However, many of the existing image quality features used in face anti-spoofing systems are not well discriminating spoofed and genuine faces. Additionally, State-of-the-art face anti-spoofing systems that use deep learning approaches do not generalize well. Thus, to address the above problem, this PhD dissertation proposes hybrid face anti-spoofing system that considers the best from image quality feature and deep learning approaches. This work selects and proposes a set of seven novel no-reference image quality features measurement, that discriminate well between spoofed and genuine faces, to complement the deep learning approach. It then, proposes two approaches: In the first approach, the scores from the image quality features are fused with the deep learning classifier scores in a weighted fashion. The combined scores are used to determine whether a given input face image is genuine or spoofed. In the second approach, the image quality features are concatenated with the deep learning features. Then, the concatenated features vector is fed to the classifier to improve the performance and generalization of anti-spoofing system. Extensive evaluations are conducted to evaluate their performance on five benchmark face anti-spoofing datasets: Replay-Attack, CASIA-MFSD, MSU-MFSD, OULU-NPU and SiW. Experiments on these datasets show that it gives better results than several of the state-of-the-art anti-spoofing systems in many scenarios