MoFA: Model-based Deep Convolutional Face Autoencoder for Unsupervised Monocular Reconstruction

In this work we propose a novel model-based deep convolutional autoencoder that addresses the highly challenging problem of reconstructing a 3D human face from a single in-the-wild color image. To this end, we combine a convolutional encoder network with an expert-designed generative model that serves as decoder. The core innovation is our new differentiable parametric decoder that encapsulates image formation analytically based on a generative model. Our decoder takes as input a code vector with exactly defined semantic meaning that encodes detailed face pose, shape, expression, skin reflectance and scene illumination. Due to this new way of combining CNN-based with model-based face reconstruction, the CNN-based encoder learns to extract semantically meaningful parameters from a single monocular input image. For the first time, a CNN encoder and an expert-designed generative model can be trained end-to-end in an unsupervised manner, which renders training on very large (unlabeled) real world data feasible. The obtained reconstructions compare favorably to current state-of-the-art approaches in terms of quality and richness of representation.Comment: International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) 2017 (Oral), 13 page

Review of Face Detection Systems Based Artificial Neural Networks Algorithms

Face detection is one of the most relevant applications of image processing and biometric systems. Artificial neural networks (ANN) have been used in the field of image processing and pattern recognition. There is lack of literature surveys which give overview about the studies and researches related to the using of ANN in face detection. Therefore, this research includes a general review of face detection studies and systems which based on different ANN approaches and algorithms. The strengths and limitations of these literature studies and systems were included also.Comment: 16 pages, 12 figures, 1 table, IJMA Journa

Fair comparison of skin detection approaches on publicly available datasets

Skin detection is the process of discriminating skin and non-skin regions in a digital image and it is widely used in several applications ranging from hand gesture analysis to track body parts and face detection. Skin detection is a challenging problem which has drawn extensive attention from the research community, nevertheless a fair comparison among approaches is very difficult due to the lack of a common benchmark and a unified testing protocol. In this work, we investigate the most recent researches in this field and we propose a fair comparison among approaches using several different datasets. The major contributions of this work are an exhaustive literature review of skin color detection approaches, a framework to evaluate and combine different skin detector approaches, whose source code is made freely available for future research, and an extensive experimental comparison among several recent methods which have also been used to define an ensemble that works well in many different problems. Experiments are carried out in 10 different datasets including more than 10000 labelled images: experimental results confirm that the best method here proposed obtains a very good performance with respect to other stand-alone approaches, without requiring ad hoc parameter tuning. A MATLAB version of the framework for testing and of the methods proposed in this paper will be freely available from https://github.com/LorisNann

Driver Distraction Identification with an Ensemble of Convolutional Neural Networks

The World Health Organization (WHO) reported 1.25 million deaths yearly due to road traffic accidents worldwide and the number has been continuously increasing over the last few years. Nearly fifth of these accidents are caused by distracted drivers. Existing work of distracted driver detection is concerned with a small set of distractions (mostly, cell phone usage). Unreliable ad-hoc methods are often used.In this paper, we present the first publicly available dataset for driver distraction identification with more distraction postures than existing alternatives. In addition, we propose a reliable deep learning-based solution that achieves a 90% accuracy. The system consists of a genetically-weighted ensemble of convolutional neural networks, we show that a weighted ensemble of classifiers using a genetic algorithm yields in a better classification confidence. We also study the effect of different visual elements in distraction detection by means of face and hand localizations, and skin segmentation. Finally, we present a thinned version of our ensemble that could achieve 84.64% classification accuracy and operate in a real-time environment.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1706.0949

Self-supervised Multi-level Face Model Learning for Monocular Reconstruction at over 250 Hz

The reconstruction of dense 3D models of face geometry and appearance from a single image is highly challenging and ill-posed. To constrain the problem, many approaches rely on strong priors, such as parametric face models learned from limited 3D scan data. However, prior models restrict generalization of the true diversity in facial geometry, skin reflectance and illumination. To alleviate this problem, we present the first approach that jointly learns 1) a regressor for face shape, expression, reflectance and illumination on the basis of 2) a concurrently learned parametric face model. Our multi-level face model combines the advantage of 3D Morphable Models for regularization with the out-of-space generalization of a learned corrective space. We train end-to-end on in-the-wild images without dense annotations by fusing a convolutional encoder with a differentiable expert-designed renderer and a self-supervised training loss, both defined at multiple detail levels. Our approach compares favorably to the state-of-the-art in terms of reconstruction quality, better generalizes to real world faces, and runs at over 250 Hz.Comment: CVPR 2018 (Oral). Project webpage: https://gvv.mpi-inf.mpg.de/projects/FML