A 3D Face Modelling Approach for Pose-Invariant Face Recognition in a Human-Robot Environment

Face analysis techniques have become a crucial component of human-machine interaction in the fields of assistive and humanoid robotics. However, the variations in head-pose that arise naturally in these environments are still a great challenge. In this paper, we present a real-time capable 3D face modelling framework for 2D in-the-wild images that is applicable for robotics. The fitting of the 3D Morphable Model is based exclusively on automatically detected landmarks. After fitting, the face can be corrected in pose and transformed back to a frontal 2D representation that is more suitable for face recognition. We conduct face recognition experiments with non-frontal images from the MUCT database and uncontrolled, in the wild images from the PaSC database, the most challenging face recognition database to date, showing an improved performance. Finally, we present our SCITOS G5 robot system, which incorporates our framework as a means of image pre-processing for face analysis

Reference face graph for face recognition

Face recognition has been studied extensively; however, real-world face recognition still remains a challenging task. The demand for unconstrained practical face recognition is rising with the explosion of online multimedia such as social networks, and video surveillance footage where face analysis is of significant importance. In this paper, we approach face recognition in the context of graph theory. We recognize an unknown face using an external reference face graph (RFG). An RFG is generated and recognition of a given face is achieved by comparing it to the faces in the constructed RFG. Centrality measures are utilized to identify distinctive faces in the reference face graph. The proposed RFG-based face recognition algorithm is robust to the changes in pose and it is also alignment free. The RFG recognition is used in conjunction with DCT locality sensitive hashing for efficient retrieval to ensure scalability. Experiments are conducted on several publicly available databases and the results show that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods without any preprocessing necessities such as face alignment. Due to the richness in the reference set construction, the proposed method can also handle illumination and expression variation

A comprehensive survey on Pose-Invariant Face Recognition

© 2016 ACM. The capacity to recognize faces under varied poses is a fundamental human ability that presents a unique challenge for computer vision systems. Compared to frontal face recognition, which has been intensively studied and has gradually matured in the past few decades, Pose-Invariant Face Recognition (PIFR) remains a largely unsolved problem. However, PIFR is crucial to realizing the full potential of face recognition for real-world applications, since face recognition is intrinsically a passive biometric technology for recognizing uncooperative subjects. In this article, we discuss the inherent difficulties in PIFR and present a comprehensive review of established techniques. Existing PIFR methods can be grouped into four categories, that is, pose-robust feature extraction approaches, multiview subspace learning approaches, face synthesis approaches, and hybrid approaches. The motivations, strategies, pros/cons, and performance of representative approaches are described and compared. Moreover, promising directions for future research are discussed

Fast Landmark Localization with 3D Component Reconstruction and CNN for Cross-Pose Recognition

Two approaches are proposed for cross-pose face recognition, one is based on the 3D reconstruction of facial components and the other is based on the deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Unlike most 3D approaches that consider holistic faces, the proposed approach considers 3D facial components. It segments a 2D gallery face into components, reconstructs the 3D surface for each component, and recognizes a probe face by component features. The segmentation is based on the landmarks located by a hierarchical algorithm that combines the Faster R-CNN for face detection and the Reduced Tree Structured Model for landmark localization. The core part of the CNN-based approach is a revised VGG network. We study the performances with different settings on the training set, including the synthesized data from 3D reconstruction, the real-life data from an in-the-wild database, and both types of data combined. We investigate the performances of the network when it is employed as a classifier or designed as a feature extractor. The two recognition approaches and the fast landmark localization are evaluated in extensive experiments, and compared to stateof-the-art methods to demonstrate their efficacy.Comment: 14 pages, 12 figures, 4 table

One-to-many face recognition with bilinear CNNs

The recent explosive growth in convolutional neural network (CNN) research has produced a variety of new architectures for deep learning. One intriguing new architecture is the bilinear CNN (B-CNN), which has shown dramatic performance gains on certain fine-grained recognition problems [15]. We apply this new CNN to the challenging new face recognition benchmark, the IARPA Janus Benchmark A (IJB-A) [12]. It features faces from a large number of identities in challenging real-world conditions. Because the face images were not identified automatically using a computerized face detection system, it does not have the bias inherent in such a database. We demonstrate the performance of the B-CNN model beginning from an AlexNet-style network pre-trained on ImageNet. We then show results for fine-tuning using a moderate-sized and public external database, FaceScrub [17]. We also present results with additional fine-tuning on the limited training data provided by the protocol. In each case, the fine-tuned bilinear model shows substantial improvements over the standard CNN. Finally, we demonstrate how a standard CNN pre-trained on a large face database, the recently released VGG-Face model [20], can be converted into a B-CNN without any additional feature training. This B-CNN improves upon the CNN performance on the IJB-A benchmark, achieving 89.5% rank-1 recall.Comment: Published version at WACV 201