Reconhecimento de padrões em expressões faciais : algoritmos e aplicações

Orientador: Hélio PedriniTese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de ComputaçãoResumo: O reconhecimento de emoções tem-se tornado um tópico relevante de pesquisa pela comunidade científica, uma vez que desempenha um papel essencial na melhoria contínua dos sistemas de interação humano-computador. Ele pode ser aplicado em diversas áreas, tais como medicina, entretenimento, vigilância, biometria, educação, redes sociais e computação afetiva. Há alguns desafios em aberto relacionados ao desenvolvimento de sistemas emocionais baseados em expressões faciais, como dados que refletem emoções mais espontâneas e cenários reais. Nesta tese de doutorado, apresentamos diferentes metodologias para o desenvolvimento de sistemas de reconhecimento de emoções baseado em expressões faciais, bem como sua aplicabilidade na resolução de outros problemas semelhantes. A primeira metodologia é apresentada para o reconhecimento de emoções em expressões faciais ocluídas baseada no Histograma da Transformada Census (CENTRIST). Expressões faciais ocluídas são reconstruídas usando a Análise Robusta de Componentes Principais (RPCA). A extração de características das expressões faciais é realizada pelo CENTRIST, bem como pelos Padrões Binários Locais (LBP), pela Codificação Local do Gradiente (LGC) e por uma extensão do LGC. O espaço de características gerado é reduzido aplicando-se a Análise de Componentes Principais (PCA) e a Análise Discriminante Linear (LDA). Os algoritmos K-Vizinhos mais Próximos (KNN) e Máquinas de Vetores de Suporte (SVM) são usados para classificação. O método alcançou taxas de acerto competitivas para expressões faciais ocluídas e não ocluídas. A segunda é proposta para o reconhecimento dinâmico de expressões faciais baseado em Ritmos Visuais (VR) e Imagens da História do Movimento (MHI), de modo que uma fusão de ambos descritores codifique informações de aparência, forma e movimento dos vídeos. Para extração das características, o Descritor Local de Weber (WLD), o CENTRIST, o Histograma de Gradientes Orientados (HOG) e a Matriz de Coocorrência em Nível de Cinza (GLCM) são empregados. A abordagem apresenta uma nova proposta para o reconhecimento dinâmico de expressões faciais e uma análise da relevância das partes faciais. A terceira é um método eficaz apresentado para o reconhecimento de emoções audiovisuais com base na fala e nas expressões faciais. A metodologia envolve uma rede neural híbrida para extrair características visuais e de áudio dos vídeos. Para extração de áudio, uma Rede Neural Convolucional (CNN) baseada no log-espectrograma de Mel é usada, enquanto uma CNN construída sobre a Transformada de Census é empregada para a extração das características visuais. Os atributos audiovisuais são reduzidos por PCA e LDA, então classificados por KNN, SVM, Regressão Logística (LR) e Gaussian Naïve Bayes (GNB). A abordagem obteve taxas de reconhecimento competitivas, especialmente em dados espontâneos. A penúltima investiga o problema de detectar a síndrome de Down a partir de fotografias. Um descritor geométrico é proposto para extrair características faciais. Experimentos realizados em uma base de dados pública mostram a eficácia da metodologia desenvolvida. A última metodologia trata do reconhecimento de síndromes genéticas em fotografias. O método visa extrair atributos faciais usando características de uma rede neural profunda e medidas antropométricas. Experimentos são realizados em uma base de dados pública, alcançando taxas de reconhecimento competitivasAbstract: Emotion recognition has become a relevant research topic by the scientific community, since it plays an essential role in the continuous improvement of human-computer interaction systems. It can be applied in various areas, for instance, medicine, entertainment, surveillance, biometrics, education, social networks, and affective computing. There are some open challenges related to the development of emotion systems based on facial expressions, such as data that reflect more spontaneous emotions and real scenarios. In this doctoral dissertation, we propose different methodologies to the development of emotion recognition systems based on facial expressions, as well as their applicability in the development of other similar problems. The first is an emotion recognition methodology for occluded facial expressions based on the Census Transform Histogram (CENTRIST). Occluded facial expressions are reconstructed using an algorithm based on Robust Principal Component Analysis (RPCA). Extraction of facial expression features is then performed by CENTRIST, as well as Local Binary Patterns (LBP), Local Gradient Coding (LGC), and an LGC extension. The generated feature space is reduced by applying Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA). K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithms are used for classification. This method reached competitive accuracy rates for occluded and non-occluded facial expressions. The second proposes a dynamic facial expression recognition based on Visual Rhythms (VR) and Motion History Images (MHI), such that a fusion of both encodes appearance, shape, and motion information of the video sequences. For feature extraction, Weber Local Descriptor (WLD), CENTRIST, Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG), and Gray-Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) are employed. This approach shows a new direction for performing dynamic facial expression recognition, and an analysis of the relevance of facial parts. The third is an effective method for audio-visual emotion recognition based on speech and facial expressions. The methodology involves a hybrid neural network to extract audio and visual features from videos. For audio extraction, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based on log Mel-spectrogram is used, whereas a CNN built on Census Transform is employed for visual extraction. The audio and visual features are reduced by PCA and LDA, and classified through KNN, SVM, Logistic Regression (LR), and Gaussian Naïve Bayes (GNB). This approach achieves competitive recognition rates, especially in a spontaneous data set. The second last investigates the problem of detecting Down syndrome from photographs. A geometric descriptor is proposed to extract facial features. Experiments performed on a public data set show the effectiveness of the developed methodology. The last methodology is about recognizing genetic disorders in photos. This method focuses on extracting facial features using deep features and anthropometric measurements. Experiments are conducted on a public data set, achieving competitive recognition ratesDoutoradoCiência da ComputaçãoDoutora em Ciência da Computação140532/2019-6CNPQCAPE

Group Affect Prediction Using Multimodal Distributions

We describe our approach towards building an efficient predictive model to detect emotions for a group of people in an image. We have proposed that training a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model on the emotion heatmaps extracted from the image, outperforms a CNN model trained entirely on the raw images. The comparison of the models have been done on a recently published dataset of Emotion Recognition in the Wild (EmotiW) challenge, 2017. The proposed method achieved validation accuracy of 55.23% which is 2.44% above the baseline accuracy, provided by the EmotiW organizers.Comment: This research paper has been accepted at Workshop on Computer Vision for Active and Assisted Living, WACV 201

Facial Expression Analysis under Partial Occlusion: A Survey

Automatic machine-based Facial Expression Analysis (FEA) has made substantial progress in the past few decades driven by its importance for applications in psychology, security, health, entertainment and human computer interaction. The vast majority of completed FEA studies are based on non-occluded faces collected in a controlled laboratory environment. Automatic expression recognition tolerant to partial occlusion remains less understood, particularly in real-world scenarios. In recent years, efforts investigating techniques to handle partial occlusion for FEA have seen an increase. The context is right for a comprehensive perspective of these developments and the state of the art from this perspective. This survey provides such a comprehensive review of recent advances in dataset creation, algorithm development, and investigations of the effects of occlusion critical for robust performance in FEA systems. It outlines existing challenges in overcoming partial occlusion and discusses possible opportunities in advancing the technology. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first FEA survey dedicated to occlusion and aimed at promoting better informed and benchmarked future work.Comment: Authors pre-print of the article accepted for publication in ACM Computing Surveys (accepted on 02-Nov-2017

Image Processing for Event Detection in Retail Environments

Estudo, desenvolvimento e aplicação de técnicas e algoritmos de processamento e segmentação de imagem para deteção de eventos em ambientes de retalho - deteção e estudo de alterações e ocultações, provocadas por pessoas e/ou objetos, em determinadas regiões de uma loja de roupa

Affect Analysis and Membership Recognition in Group Settings

PhD ThesisEmotions play an important role in our day-to-day life in various ways, including, but not limited to, how we humans communicate and behave. Machines can interact with humans more naturally and intelligently if they are able to recognise and understand humans’ emotions and express their own emotions. To achieve this goal, in the past two decades, researchers have been paying a lot of attention to the analysis of affective states, which has been studied extensively across various fields, such as neuroscience, psychology, cognitive science, and computer science. Most of the existing works focus on affect analysis in individual settings, where there is one person in an image or in a video. However, in the real world, people are very often with others, or interact in group settings. In this thesis, we will focus on affect analysis in group settings. Affect analysis in group settings is different from that in individual settings and provides more challenges due to dynamic interactions between the group members, various occlusions among people in the scene, and the complex context, e.g., who people are with, where people are staying and the mutual influences among people in the group. Because of these challenges, there are still a number of open issues that need further investigation in order to advance the state of the art, and explore the methodologies for affect analysis in group settings. These open topics include but are not limited to (1) is it possible to transfer the methods used for the affect recognition of a person in individual settings to the affect recognition of each individual in group settings? (2) is it possible to recognise the affect of one individual using the expressed behaviours of another member in the same group (i.e., cross-subject affect recognition)? (3) can non-verbal behaviours be used for the recognition of contextual information in group settings? In this thesis, we investigate the affect analysis in group settings and propose methods to explore the aforementioned research questions step by step. Firstly, we propose a method for individual affect recognition in both individual and group videos, which is also used for social context prediction, i.e., whether a person is alone or within a group. Secondly, we introduce a novel framework for cross-subject affect analysis in group videos. Specifically, we analyse the correlation of the affect among group members and investigate the automatic recognition of the affect of one subject using the behaviours expressed by another subject in the same group or in a different group. Furthermore, we propose methods for contextual information prediction in group settings, i.e., group membership recognition - to recognise which group of the person belongs. Comprehensive experiments are conducted using two datasets that one contains individual videos and one contains group videos. The experimental results show that (1) the methods used for affect recognition of a person in individual settings can be transferred to group settings; (2) the affect of one subject in a group can be better predicted using the expressive behaviours of another subject within the same group than using that of a subject from a different group; and (3) contextual information (i.e., whether a person is staying alone or within a group, and group membership) can be predicted successfully using non-verbal behaviours

Detecção de eventos violentos em sequências de vídeos baseada no operador histograma da transformada census

Orientador: Hélio PedriniDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de ComputaçãoResumo: Sistemas de vigilância em sequências de vídeo têm sido amplamente utilizados para o monitoramento de cenas em diversos ambientes, tais como aeroportos, bancos, escolas, indústrias, estações de ônibus e trens, rodovias e lojas. Devido à grande quantidade de informação obtida pelas câmeras de vigilância, o uso de inspeção visual por operadores de câmera se torna uma tarefa cansativa e sujeita a falhas, além de consumir muito tempo. Um desafio é o desenvolvimento de sistemas inteligentes de vigilância capazes de analisar longas sequências de vídeos capturadas por uma rede de câmeras de modo a identificar um determinado comportamento. Neste trabalho, foram propostas e avaliadas diversas técnicas de classificação, tendo como base o operador CENTRIST (Histograma da Transformada Census), no contexto de identificação de eventos violentos em cenas de vídeo. Adicionalmente, foram avaliados outros descritores tradicionais, como HoG (Histograma de Gradientes Orientados), HOF (Histograma do Fluxo Óptico) e descritores extraídos a partir de modelos de aprendizado de máquina profundo pré-treinados. De modo a permitir a avaliação apenas em regiões de interesse presentes nos quadros dos vídeos, técnicas para remoção do fundo da cena. Uma abordagem baseada em janela deslizante foi utilizada para avaliar regiões menores da cena em combinação com um critério de votação. A janela deslizante é então aplicada juntamente com uma filtragem de blocos utilizando fluxo óptico da cena. Para demonstrar a efetividade de nosso método para discriminar violência em cenas de multidões, os resultados obtidos foram comparados com outras abordagens disponíveis na literatura em duas bases de dados públicas (Violence in Crowds e Hockey Fights). A eficácia da combinação entre CENTRIST e HoG foi demonstrada em comparação com a utilização desses operadores individualmente. A combinação desses operadores obteve aproximadamente 88% contra 81% utilizando apenas HoG e 86% utilizando CENTRIST. A partir do refinamento do método proposto, foi identificado que avaliar blocos do quadro com a abordagem de janela deslizante tornou o método mais eficaz. Técnicas para geração de palavras visuais com codificação esparsa, medida de distância com um modelo de misturas Gaussianas e medida de distância entre agrupamentos também foram avaliadas e discutidas. Além disso, também foi avaliado calcular dinamicamente o limiar de votação, o que trouxe resultados melhores em alguns casos. Finalmente, formas de restringir os atores presentes nas cenas utilizando fluxo óptico foram analisadas. Utilizando o método de Otsu para calcular o limiar do fluxo óptico da cena a eficiência supera nossos resultados mais competitivos: 91,46% de acurácia para a base Violence in Crowds e 92,79% para a base Hockey FightsAbstract: Surveillance systems in video sequences have been widely used to monitor scenes in various environments, such as airports, banks, schools, industries, bus and train stations, highways and stores. Due to the large amount of information obtained via surveillance cameras, the use of visual inspection by camera operators becomes a task subject to fatigue and failure, in addition to consuming a lot of time. One challenge is the development of intelligent surveillance systems capable of analyzing long video sequences captured by a network of cameras in order to identify a certain behavior. In this work, we propose and analyze the use of several classification techniques, based on the CENTRIST (Transformation Census Histogram) operator, in the context of identifying violent events in video scenes. Additionally, we evaluated other traditional descriptors, such as HoG (Oriented Gradient Histogram), HOF (Optical Flow Histogram) and descriptors extracted from pre-trained deep machine learning models. In order to allow the evaluation only in regions of interest present in the video frames, we investigated techniques for removing the background from the scene. A sliding window-based approach was used to assess smaller regions of the scene in combination with a voting criterion. The sliding window is then applied along with block filtering using the optical flow of the scene. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for discriminating violence in crowd scenes, we compared the results to other approaches available in the literature in two public databases (Violence in Crowds and Hockey Fights). The combination of CENTRIST and HoG was demonstrated in comparison to the use of these operators individually. The combination of both operators obtained approximately 88% against 81% using only HoG and 86% using CENTRIST. From the refinement of the proposed method, we identified that evaluating blocks of the frame with the sliding window-based approach made the method more effective. Techniques for generating a codebook with sparse coding, distance measurement with a Gaussian mixture model and distance measurement between clusters were evaluated and discussed. Also we dynamically calculate the threshold for class voting, which obtained superior results in some cases. Finally, strategies for restricting the actors present in the scenes using optical flow were analyzed. By using the Otsu¿s method to calculate the threshold from the optical flow at the scene, the effectiveness surpasses our most competitive results: 91.46% accuracy for the Violence in Crowds dataset and 92.79% for the Hockey Fights datasetMestradoCiência da ComputaçãoMestre em Ciência da Computaçã

RECOGNITION OF FACES FROM SINGLE AND MULTI-VIEW VIDEOS

Face recognition has been an active research field for decades. In recent years, with videos playing an increasingly important role in our everyday life, video-based face recognition has begun to attract considerable research interest. This leads to a wide range of potential application areas, including TV/movies search and parsing, video surveillance, access control etc. Preliminary research results in this field have suggested that by exploiting the abundant spatial-temporal information contained in videos, we can greatly improve the accuracy and robustness of a visual recognition system. On the other hand, as this research area is still in its infancy, developing an end-to-end face processing pipeline that can robustly detect, track and recognize faces remains a challenging task. The goal of this dissertation is to study some of the related problems under different settings. We address the video-based face association problem, in which one attempts to extract face tracks of multiple subjects while maintaining label consistency. Traditional tracking algorithms have difficulty in handling this task, especially when challenging nuisance factors like motion blur, low resolution or significant camera motions are present. We demonstrate that contextual features, in addition to face appearance itself, play an important role in this case. We propose principled methods to combine multiple features using Conditional Random Fields and Max-Margin Markov networks to infer labels for the detected faces. Different from many existing approaches, our algorithms work in online mode and hence have a wider range of applications. We address issues such as parameter learning, inference and handling false positves/negatives that arise in the proposed approach. Finally, we evaluate our approach on several public databases. We next propose a novel video-based face recognition framework. We address the problem from two different aspects: To handle pose variations, we learn a Structural-SVM based detector which can simultaneously localize the face fiducial points and estimate the face pose. By adopting a different optimization criterion from existing algorithms, we are able to improve localization accuracy. To model other face variations, we use intra-personal/extra-personal dictionaries. The intra-personal/extra-personal modeling of human faces has been shown to work successfully in the Bayesian face recognition framework. It has additional advantages in scalability and generalization, which are of critical importance to real-world applications. Combining intra-personal/extra-personal models with dictionary learning enables us to achieve state-of-arts performance on unconstrained video data, even when the training data come from a different database. Finally, we present an approach for video-based face recognition using camera networks. The focus is on handling pose variations by applying the strength of the multi-view camera network. However, rather than taking the typical approach of modeling these variations, which eventually requires explicit knowledge about pose parameters, we rely on a pose-robust feature that eliminates the needs for pose estimation. The pose-robust feature is developed using the Spherical Harmonic (SH) representation theory. It is extracted using the surface texture map of a spherical model which approximates the subject's head. Feature vectors extracted from a video are modeled as an ensemble of instances of a probability distribution in the Reduced Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS). The ensemble similarity measure in RKHS improves both robustness and accuracy of the recognition system. The proposed approach outperforms traditional algorithms on a multi-view video database collected using a camera network

Multi-sensor multi-person tracking on a mobile robot platform

Service robots need to be aware of persons in their vicinity in order to interact with them. People tracking enables the robot to perceive persons by fusing the information of several sensors. Most robots rely on laser range scanners and RGB cameras for this task. The thesis focuses on the detection and tracking of heads. This allows the robot to establish eye contact, which makes interactions feel more natural. Developing a fast and reliable pose-invariant head detector is challenging. The head detector that is proposed in this thesis works well on frontal heads, but is not fully pose-invariant. This thesis further explores adaptive tracking to keep track of heads that do not face the robot. Finally, head detector and adaptive tracker are combined within a new people tracking framework and experiments show its effectiveness compared to a state-of-the-art system

What is folk psychology and who cares?

Die Dissertation präsentiert und diskutiert die Debatte zwischen zwei Theorien der Alltagspsychologie – Theorie-theorie (TT) und Simulationstheorie (ST). Nach einer historischen Kontextualiserung der beiden Theorien, werden die wichtigsten Versionen der zwei Theorien vorgestellt und kritisiert. Meine Schlussfolgerung ist, dass keine einheitliche Unterscheidung zwischen den zwei Theorien vorgenommen werden kann. Sie stellen vielmehr ein breites Spektrum an theoretischen Optionen dar, die bei der weiteren Entwicklung einer Theorie über die Alltagspsychologie berücksichtigt werden sollten. In der zweiten Hälfte der Dissertation diskutiere ich neuere Arbeiten in den Neurowissenschaften, die für diese Thematik relevant sind. Ein längeres Kapitel ist den sogenannten Spiegelneuronen gewidmet, weil diese Forschungsrichtung einen wichtigen Beleg für die ST darstellt, insofern als die ST vorhersagen würde, dass Ressourcen, die für die eigenen Handlungen gebraucht werden, auch für die Deutung der Handlungen anderer Menschen benutzt werden. Das Verstehen von Handlungen verlangt aber eine abstraktere Repräsentation als die Spiegelneuronen leisten könnten, da Handlungen durch motorische Bewegungen unterbestimmt sind (da eine Handlung mit verschiedenen Bewegungen ausgeführt werden könnte und verschiede Handlungen mit ein und derselben Bewegung ausgeführt werden können). Daher ist der Beitrag der Spiegeleuronen zum Verstehen von Handlungen wohl im Zusammenhang mit anderen Bereichen (z.B. STS, SMC) zu vermuten. Ich diskutiere auch Begriffstheorien, die es ermöglichen, solche Elemente innerhalb eines simulationstheoretischen Rahmens zu integrieren.The dissertation presents and critically discusses the debate between two rival theories of folk psychology – theory theory (TT) and simulation theory (ST). After a contextualization of the folk psychology discussion within the history of philosophy, I analyze the leading versions of both theories. My conclusion is that there is no uniform distinction to be made between the two competing theories; rather, the various versions represent a broad range of ideas, many of which may prove useful in ongoing empirical research. In the second half of the dissertation, I discuss recent work on social cognition in neuroscience that should taken into consideration in further developing a theory of folk psychology. A long chapter is devoted to interpretations of mirror neuron (MN), since this work constitutes support for ST, insofar as ST would predict that resources for action (e.g. the motor system) would be used in action understanding. But since action understanding appears to require a more abstract kind of representation than motor representation (since one action can be carried out with different movements and different actions can be carried out with one and the same movement in different contexts) and to incorporate contextual information, the role of mirror neurons is likely to be contingent upon their integration with other areas (e.g. STS, SMC) I also discuss theories of concepts that make it possible to integrate such elements within a simulatinist framework