Visibility Constrained Generative Model for Depth-based 3D Facial Pose Tracking

In this paper, we propose a generative framework that unifies depth-based 3D facial pose tracking and face model adaptation on-the-fly, in the unconstrained scenarios with heavy occlusions and arbitrary facial expression variations. Specifically, we introduce a statistical 3D morphable model that flexibly describes the distribution of points on the surface of the face model, with an efficient switchable online adaptation that gradually captures the identity of the tracked subject and rapidly constructs a suitable face model when the subject changes. Moreover, unlike prior art that employed ICP-based facial pose estimation, to improve robustness to occlusions, we propose a ray visibility constraint that regularizes the pose based on the face model's visibility with respect to the input point cloud. Ablation studies and experimental results on Biwi and ICT-3DHP datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework is effective and outperforms completing state-of-the-art depth-based methods

Vision-Based Production of Personalized Video

In this paper we present a novel vision-based system for the automated production of personalised video souvenirs for visitors in leisure and cultural heritage venues. Visitors are visually identified and tracked through a camera network. The system produces a personalized DVD souvenir at the end of a visitor’s stay allowing visitors to relive their experiences. We analyze how we identify visitors by fusing facial and body features, how we track visitors, how the tracker recovers from failures due to occlusions, as well as how we annotate and compile the final product. Our experiments demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach

Improving Facial Analysis and Performance Driven Animation through Disentangling Identity and Expression

We present techniques for improving performance driven facial animation, emotion recognition, and facial key-point or landmark prediction using learned identity invariant representations. Established approaches to these problems can work well if sufficient examples and labels for a particular identity are available and factors of variation are highly controlled. However, labeled examples of facial expressions, emotions and key-points for new individuals are difficult and costly to obtain. In this paper we improve the ability of techniques to generalize to new and unseen individuals by explicitly modeling previously seen variations related to identity and expression. We use a weakly-supervised approach in which identity labels are used to learn the different factors of variation linked to identity separately from factors related to expression. We show how probabilistic modeling of these sources of variation allows one to learn identity-invariant representations for expressions which can then be used to identity-normalize various procedures for facial expression analysis and animation control. We also show how to extend the widely used techniques of active appearance models and constrained local models through replacing the underlying point distribution models which are typically constructed using principal component analysis with identity-expression factorized representations. We present a wide variety of experiments in which we consistently improve performance on emotion recognition, markerless performance-driven facial animation and facial key-point tracking.Comment: to appear in Image and Vision Computing Journal (IMAVIS

Taking the bite out of automated naming of characters in TV video

We investigate the problem of automatically labelling appearances of characters in TV or film material with their names. This is tremendously challenging due to the huge variation in imaged appearance of each character and the weakness and ambiguity of available annotation. However, we demonstrate that high precision can be achieved by combining multiple sources of information, both visual and textual. The principal novelties that we introduce are: (i) automatic generation of time stamped character annotation by aligning subtitles and transcripts; (ii) strengthening the supervisory information by identifying when characters are speaking. In addition, we incorporate complementary cues of face matching and clothing matching to propose common annotations for face tracks, and consider choices of classifier which can potentially correct errors made in the automatic extraction of training data from the weak textual annotation. Results are presented on episodes of the TV series ‘‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer”

Multi-stream gaussian mixture model based facial feature localization=Çoklu gauss karışım modeli tabanlı yüz öznitelikleri bulma algoritması

This paper presents a new facial feature localization system which estimates positions of eyes, nose and mouth corners simultaneously. In contrast to conventional systems, we use the multi-stream Gaussian mixture model (GMM) framework in order to represent structural and appearance information of facial features. We construct a GMM for the region of each facial feature, where the principal component analysis is used to extract each facial feature. We also build a GMM which represents the structural information of a face, relative positions of facial features. Those models are combined based on the multi-stream framework. It can reduce the computation time to search region of interest (ROI). We demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm through experiments on the BioID Face Database

Lip segmentation using adaptive color space training

In audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR), it is beneficial to use lip boundary information in addition to texture-dependent features. In this paper, we propose an automatic lip segmentation method that can be used in AVSR systems. The algorithm consists of the following steps: face detection, lip corners extraction, adaptive color space training for lip and non-lip regions using Gaussian mixture models (GMMs), and curve evolution using level-set formulation based on region and image gradients fields. Region-based fields are obtained using adapted GMM likelihoods. We have tested the proposed algorithm on a database (SU-TAV) of 100 facial images and obtained objective performance results by comparing automatic lip segmentations with hand-marked ground truth segmentations. Experimental results are promising and much work has to be done to improve the robustness of the proposed method