Unsupervised learning of object landmarks by factorized spatial embeddings

Learning automatically the structure of object categories remains an important open problem in computer vision. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised approach that can discover and learn landmarks in object categories, thus characterizing their structure. Our approach is based on factorizing image deformations, as induced by a viewpoint change or an object deformation, by learning a deep neural network that detects landmarks consistently with such visual effects. Furthermore, we show that the learned landmarks establish meaningful correspondences between different object instances in a category without having to impose this requirement explicitly. We assess the method qualitatively on a variety of object types, natural and man-made. We also show that our unsupervised landmarks are highly predictive of manually-annotated landmarks in face benchmark datasets, and can be used to regress these with a high degree of accuracy.Comment: To be published in ICCV 201

Self-supervised learning of a facial attribute embedding from video

We propose a self-supervised framework for learning facial attributes by simply watching videos of a human face speaking, laughing, and moving over time. To perform this task, we introduce a network, Facial Attributes-Net (FAb-Net), that is trained to embed multiple frames from the same video face-track into a common low-dimensional space. With this approach, we make three contributions: first, we show that the network can leverage information from multiple source frames by predicting confidence/attention masks for each frame; second, we demonstrate that using a curriculum learning regime improves the learned embedding; finally, we demonstrate that the network learns a meaningful face embedding that encodes information about head pose, facial landmarks and facial expression, i.e. facial attributes, without having been supervised with any labelled data. We are comparable or superior to state-of-the-art self-supervised methods on these tasks and approach the performance of supervised methods.Comment: To appear in BMVC 2018. Supplementary material can be found at http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/research/unsup_learn_watch_faces/fabnet.htm

Multi-Image Semantic Matching by Mining Consistent Features

This work proposes a multi-image matching method to estimate semantic correspondences across multiple images. In contrast to the previous methods that optimize all pairwise correspondences, the proposed method identifies and matches only a sparse set of reliable features in the image collection. In this way, the proposed method is able to prune nonrepeatable features and also highly scalable to handle thousands of images. We additionally propose a low-rank constraint to ensure the geometric consistency of feature correspondences over the whole image collection. Besides the competitive performance on multi-graph matching and semantic flow benchmarks, we also demonstrate the applicability of the proposed method for reconstructing object-class models and discovering object-class landmarks from images without using any annotation.Comment: CVPR 201

BRUL\`E: Barycenter-Regularized Unsupervised Landmark Extraction

Unsupervised retrieval of image features is vital for many computer vision tasks where the annotation is missing or scarce. In this work, we propose a new unsupervised approach to detect the landmarks in images, validating it on the popular task of human face key-points extraction. The method is based on the idea of auto-encoding the wanted landmarks in the latent space while discarding the non-essential information (and effectively preserving the interpretability). The interpretable latent space representation (the bottleneck containing nothing but the wanted key-points) is achieved by a new two-step regularization approach. The first regularization step evaluates transport distance from a given set of landmarks to some average value (the barycenter by Wasserstein distance). The second regularization step controls deviations from the barycenter by applying random geometric deformations synchronously to the initial image and to the encoded landmarks. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach both in unsupervised and semi-supervised training scenarios using 300-W, CelebA, and MAFL datasets. The proposed regularization paradigm is shown to prevent overfitting, and the detection quality is shown to improve beyond the state-of-the-art face models.Comment: 10 main pages with 6 figures and 1 Table, 14 pages total with 6 supplementary figures. I.B. and N.B. contributed equally. D.V.D. is corresponding autho