Forensic Face Recognition: A Survey

Beside a few papers which focus on the forensic aspects of automatic face recognition, there is not much published about it in contrast to the literature on developing new techniques and methodologies for biometric face recognition. In this report, we review forensic facial identification which is the forensic experts‟ way of manual facial comparison. Then we review famous works in the domain of forensic face recognition. Some of these papers describe general trends in forensics [1], guidelines for manual forensic facial comparison and training of face examiners who will be required to verify the outcome of automatic forensic face recognition system [2]. Some proposes theoretical framework for application of face recognition technology in forensics [3] and automatic forensic facial comparison [4, 5]. Bayesian framework is discussed in detail and it is elaborated how it can be adapted to forensic face recognition. Several issues related with court admissibility and reliability of system are also discussed. \ud Until now, there is no operational system available which automatically compare image of a suspect with mugshot database and provide result usable in court. The fact that biometric face recognition can in most cases be used for forensic purpose is true but the issues related to integration of technology with legal system of court still remain to be solved. There is a great need for research which is multi-disciplinary in nature and which will integrate the face recognition technology with existing legal systems. In this report we present a review of the existing literature in this domain and discuss various aspects and requirements for forensic face recognition systems particularly focusing on Bayesian framework

A Mimetic Strategy to Engage Voluntary Physical Activity In Interactive Entertainment

We describe the design and implementation of a vision based interactive entertainment system that makes use of both involuntary and voluntary control paradigms. Unintentional input to the system from a potential viewer is used to drive attention-getting output and encourage the transition to voluntary interactive behaviour. The iMime system consists of a character animation engine based on the interaction metaphor of a mime performer that simulates non-verbal communication strategies, without spoken dialogue, to capture and hold the attention of a viewer. The system was developed in the context of a project studying care of dementia sufferers. Care for a dementia sufferer can place unreasonable demands on the time and attentional resources of their caregivers or family members. Our study contributes to the eventual development of a system aimed at providing relief to dementia caregivers, while at the same time serving as a source of pleasant interactive entertainment for viewers. The work reported here is also aimed at a more general study of the design of interactive entertainment systems involving a mixture of voluntary and involuntary control.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures, ECAG08 worksho

Pixelating Familiar People in the Media: Should Masking Be Taken at Face Value?

This study questions the effectiveness of masking faces by means of pixelation on television or in newspapers. Previous studies have shown that masking just the face leads to unacceptably high recognition levels, making it likely that participants also use other cues for recognition, such as hairstyle or clothes. In the current study we investigate this possibility by means of an identification task in which participants had to identify (partially) masked images of familiar people. To demonstrate that non-facial cues become increasingly important for recognition as faces are masked more strongly, we manipulated the size of the masked area and the degree of pixelation. Confirming our expectations, increasing the size of masked area or its level of deterioration led to lower recognition rates. More importantly, also an interaction effect between the two variables emerged, showing that additional visual information partly compensates the downswing in recognition when masking becomes stronger. Although in some conditions low recognition rates were found, masking was never a hundred percent effective, making it clear that the media should approach this issue with care. Implications of our findings and future directions are considere

Quality of experience driven control of interactive media stream parameters

In recent years, cloud computing has led to many new kinds of services. One of these popular services is cloud gaming, which provides the entire game experience to the users remotely from a server, but also other applications are provided in a similar manner. In this paper we focus on the option to render the application in the cloud, thereby delivering the graphical output of the application to the user as a video stream. In more general terms, an interactive media stream is set up over the network between the user's device and the cloud server. The main issue with this approach is situated at the network, that currently gives little guarantees on the quality of service in terms of parameters such as available bandwidth, latency or packet loss. However, for interactive media stream cases, the user is merely interested in the perceived quality, regardless of the underlaying network situation. In this paper, we present an adaptive control mechanism that optimizes the quality of experience for the use case of a race game, by trading off visual quality against frame rate in function of the available bandwidth. Practical experiments verify that QoE driven adaptation leads to improved user experience compared to systems solely taking network characteristics into account

Multimodal database of emotional speech, video and gestures

People express emotions through different modalities. Integration of verbal and non-verbal communication channels creates a system in which the message is easier to understand. Expanding the focus to several expression forms can facilitate research on emotion recognition as well as human-machine interaction. In this article, the authors present a Polish emotional database composed of three modalities: facial expressions, body movement and gestures, and speech. The corpora contains recordings registered in studio conditions, acted out by 16 professional actors (8 male and 8 female). The data is labeled with six basic emotions categories, according to Ekman’s emotion categories. To check the quality of performance, all recordings are evaluated by experts and volunteers. The database is available to academic community and might be useful in the study on audio-visual emotion recognition