Principles and methods for face recognition and face modelling

This chapter focuses on the principles behind methods currently used for face recognition, which have a wide variety of uses from biometrics, surveillance and forensics. After a brief description of how faces can be detected in images, we describe 2D feature extraction methods that operate on all the image pixels in the face detected region: Eigenfaces and Fisherfaces first proposed in the early 1990s. Although Eigenfaces can be made to work reasonably well for faces captured in controlled conditions, such as frontal faces under the same illumination, recognition rates are poor. We discuss how greater accuracy can be achieved by extracting features from the boundaries of the faces by using Active Shape Models and, the skin textures, using Active Appearance Models, originally proposed by Cootes and Talyor. The remainder of the chapter on face recognition is dedicated such shape models, their implementation and use and their extension to 3D. We show that if multiple cameras are used the the 3D geometry of the captured faces can be recovered without the use of range scanning or structured light. 3D face models make recognition systems better at dealiing with pose and lighting variatio

A Novel Apex-Time Network for Cross-Dataset Micro-Expression Recognition

The automatic recognition of micro-expression has been boosted ever since the successful introduction of deep learning approaches. As researchers working on such topics are moving to learn from the nature of micro-expression, the practice of using deep learning techniques has evolved from processing the entire video clip of micro-expression to the recognition on apex frame. Using the apex frame is able to get rid of redundant video frames, but the relevant temporal evidence of micro-expression would be thereby left out. This paper proposes a novel Apex-Time Network (ATNet) to recognize micro-expression based on spatial information from the apex frame as well as on temporal information from the respective-adjacent frames. Through extensive experiments on three benchmarks, we demonstrate the improvement achieved by learning such temporal information. Specially, the model with such temporal information is more robust in cross-dataset validations.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, 3 tables, code available, accepted in ACII 201

Cultural-based visual expression: Emotional analysis of human face via Peking Opera Painted Faces (POPF)

© 2015 The Author(s) Peking Opera as a branch of Chinese traditional cultures and arts has a very distinct colourful facial make-up for all actors in the stage performance. Such make-up is stylised in nonverbal symbolic semantics which all combined together to form the painted faces to describe and symbolise the background, the characteristic and the emotional status of specific roles. A study of Peking Opera Painted Faces (POPF) was taken as an example to see how information and meanings can be effectively expressed through the change of facial expressions based on the facial motion within natural and emotional aspects. The study found that POPF provides exaggerated features of facial motion through images, and the symbolic semantics of POPF provides a high-level expression of human facial information. The study has presented and proved a creative structure of information analysis and expression based on POPF to improve the understanding of human facial motion and emotion

Assistive technology design and development for acceptable robotics companions for ageing years

© 2013 Farshid Amirabdollahian et al., licensee Versita Sp. z o. o. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license, which means that the text may be used for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author.A new stream of research and development responds to changes in life expectancy across the world. It includes technologies which enhance well-being of individuals, specifically for older people. The ACCOMPANY project focuses on home companion technologies and issues surrounding technology development for assistive purposes. The project responds to some overlooked aspects of technology design, divided into multiple areas such as empathic and social human-robot interaction, robot learning and memory visualisation, and monitoring persons’ activities at home. To bring these aspects together, a dedicated task is identified to ensure technological integration of these multiple approaches on an existing robotic platform, Care-O-Bot®3 in the context of a smart-home environment utilising a multitude of sensor arrays. Formative and summative evaluation cycles are then used to assess the emerging prototype towards identifying acceptable behaviours and roles for the robot, for example role as a butler or a trainer, while also comparing user requirements to achieved progress. In a novel approach, the project considers ethical concerns and by highlighting principles such as autonomy, independence, enablement, safety and privacy, it embarks on providing a discussion medium where user views on these principles and the existing tension between some of these principles, for example tension between privacy and autonomy over safety, can be captured and considered in design cycles and throughout project developmentsPeer reviewe

A cost-effective strategy for nonoscillatory convection without clipping

Clipping of narrow extrema and distortion of smooth profiles is a well known problem associated with so-called high resolution nonoscillatory convection schemes. A strategy is presented for accurately simulating highly convective flows containing discontinuities such as density fronts or shock waves, without distorting smooth profiles or clipping narrow local extrema. The convection algorithm is based on non-artificially diffusive third-order upwinding in smooth regions, with automatic adaptive stencil expansion to (in principle, arbitrarily) higher order upwinding locally, in regions of rapidly changing gradients. This is highly cost effective because the wider stencil is used only where needed-in isolated narrow regions. A recently developed universal limiter assures sharp monotonic resolution of discontinuities without introducing artificial diffusion or numerical compression. An adaptive discriminator is constructed to distinguish between spurious overshoots and physical peaks; this automatically relaxes the limiter near local turning points, thereby avoiding loss of resolution in narrow extrema. Examples are given for one-dimensional pure convection of scalar profiles at constant velocity