2,297 research outputs found
Robust Face Representation and Recognition Under Low Resolution and Difficult Lighting Conditions
This dissertation focuses on different aspects of face image analysis for accurate face recognition under low resolution and poor lighting conditions. A novel resolution enhancement technique is proposed for enhancing a low resolution face image into a high resolution image for better visualization and improved feature extraction, especially in a video surveillance environment. This method performs kernel regression and component feature learning in local neighborhood of the face images. It uses directional Fourier phase feature component to adaptively lean the regression kernel based on local covariance to estimate the high resolution image. For each patch in the neighborhood, four directional variances are estimated to adapt the interpolated pixels. A Modified Local Binary Pattern (MLBP) methodology for feature extraction is proposed to obtain robust face recognition under varying lighting conditions. Original LBP operator compares pixels in a local neighborhood with the center pixel and converts the resultant binary string to 8-bit integer value. So, it is less effective under difficult lighting conditions where variation between pixels is negligible. The proposed MLBP uses a two stage encoding procedure which is more robust in detecting this variation in a local patch. A novel dimensionality reduction technique called Marginality Preserving Embedding (MPE) is also proposed for enhancing the face recognition accuracy. Unlike Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), which project data in a global sense, MPE seeks for a local structure in the manifold. This is similar to other subspace learning techniques but the difference with other manifold learning is that MPE preserves marginality in local reconstruction. Hence it provides better representation in low dimensional space and achieves lower error rates in face recognition. Two new concepts for robust face recognition are also presented in this dissertation. In the first approach, a neural network is used for training the system where input vectors are created by measuring distance from each input to its class mean. In the second approach, half-face symmetry is used, realizing the fact that the face images may contain various expressions such as open/close eye, open/close mouth etc., and classify the top half and bottom half separately and finally fuse the two results. By performing experiments on several standard face datasets, improved results were observed in all the new proposed methodologies. Research is progressing in developing a unified approach for the extraction of features suitable for accurate face recognition in a long range video sequence in complex environments
Deep Adaptive Feature Embedding with Local Sample Distributions for Person Re-identification
Person re-identification (re-id) aims to match pedestrians observed by
disjoint camera views. It attracts increasing attention in computer vision due
to its importance to surveillance system. To combat the major challenge of
cross-view visual variations, deep embedding approaches are proposed by
learning a compact feature space from images such that the Euclidean distances
correspond to their cross-view similarity metric. However, the global Euclidean
distance cannot faithfully characterize the ideal similarity in a complex
visual feature space because features of pedestrian images exhibit unknown
distributions due to large variations in poses, illumination and occlusion.
Moreover, intra-personal training samples within a local range are robust to
guide deep embedding against uncontrolled variations, which however, cannot be
captured by a global Euclidean distance. In this paper, we study the problem of
person re-id by proposing a novel sampling to mine suitable \textit{positives}
(i.e. intra-class) within a local range to improve the deep embedding in the
context of large intra-class variations. Our method is capable of learning a
deep similarity metric adaptive to local sample structure by minimizing each
sample's local distances while propagating through the relationship between
samples to attain the whole intra-class minimization. To this end, a novel
objective function is proposed to jointly optimize similarity metric learning,
local positive mining and robust deep embedding. This yields local
discriminations by selecting local-ranged positive samples, and the learned
features are robust to dramatic intra-class variations. Experiments on
benchmarks show state-of-the-art results achieved by our method.Comment: Published on Pattern Recognitio
Manifold Elastic Net: A Unified Framework for Sparse Dimension Reduction
It is difficult to find the optimal sparse solution of a manifold learning
based dimensionality reduction algorithm. The lasso or the elastic net
penalized manifold learning based dimensionality reduction is not directly a
lasso penalized least square problem and thus the least angle regression (LARS)
(Efron et al. \cite{LARS}), one of the most popular algorithms in sparse
learning, cannot be applied. Therefore, most current approaches take indirect
ways or have strict settings, which can be inconvenient for applications. In
this paper, we proposed the manifold elastic net or MEN for short. MEN
incorporates the merits of both the manifold learning based dimensionality
reduction and the sparse learning based dimensionality reduction. By using a
series of equivalent transformations, we show MEN is equivalent to the lasso
penalized least square problem and thus LARS is adopted to obtain the optimal
sparse solution of MEN. In particular, MEN has the following advantages for
subsequent classification: 1) the local geometry of samples is well preserved
for low dimensional data representation, 2) both the margin maximization and
the classification error minimization are considered for sparse projection
calculation, 3) the projection matrix of MEN improves the parsimony in
computation, 4) the elastic net penalty reduces the over-fitting problem, and
5) the projection matrix of MEN can be interpreted psychologically and
physiologically. Experimental evidence on face recognition over various popular
datasets suggests that MEN is superior to top level dimensionality reduction
algorithms.Comment: 33 pages, 12 figure
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