Contributions on Automatic Recognition of Faces using Local Texture Features

Uno de los temas más destacados del área de visión artifical se deriva del análisis facial automático. En particular, la detección precisa de caras humanas y el análisis biométrico de las mismas son problemas que han generado especial interés debido a la gran cantidad de aplicaciones que actualmente hacen uso de estos mecnismos. En esta Tesis Doctoral se analizan por separado los problemas relacionados con detección precisa de caras basada en la localización de los ojos y el reconomcimiento facial a partir de la extracción de características locales de textura. Los algoritmos desarrollados abordan el problema de la extracción de la identidad a partir de una imagen de cara ( en vista frontal o semi-frontal), para escenarios parcialmente controlados. El objetivo es desarrollar algoritmos robustos y que puedan incorpararse fácilmente a aplicaciones reales, tales como seguridad avanzada en banca o la definición de estrategias comerciales aplicadas al sector de retail. Respecto a la extracción de texturas locales, se ha realizado un análisis exhaustivo de los descriptores más extendidos; se ha puesto especial énfasis en el estudio de los Histogramas de Grandientes Orientados (HOG features). En representaciones normalizadas de la cara, estos descriptores ofrecen información discriminativa de los elementos faciales (ojos, boca, etc.), siendo robustas a variaciones en la iluminación y pequeños desplazamientos. Se han elegido diferentes algoritmos de clasificación para realizar la detección y el reconocimiento de caras, todos basados en una estrategia de sistemas supervisados. En particular, para la localización de ojos se ha utilizado clasificadores boosting y Máquinas de Soporte Vectorial (SVM) sobre descriptores HOG. En el caso de reconocimiento de caras, se ha desarrollado un nuevo algoritmo, HOG-EBGM (HOG sobre Elastic Bunch Graph Matching). Dada la imagen de una cara, el esquema seguido por este algoritmo se puede resumir en pocos pasos: en una primera etapa se extMonzó Ferrer, D. (2012). Contributions on Automatic Recognition of Faces using Local Texture Features [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/16698Palanci

State of the Art in Face Recognition

Notwithstanding the tremendous effort to solve the face recognition problem, it is not possible yet to design a face recognition system with a potential close to human performance. New computer vision and pattern recognition approaches need to be investigated. Even new knowledge and perspectives from different fields like, psychology and neuroscience must be incorporated into the current field of face recognition to design a robust face recognition system. Indeed, many more efforts are required to end up with a human like face recognition system. This book tries to make an effort to reduce the gap between the previous face recognition research state and the future state

Joint optimization of manifold learning and sparse representations for face and gesture analysis

Face and gesture understanding algorithms are powerful enablers in intelligent vision systems for surveillance, security, entertainment, and smart spaces. In the future, complex networks of sensors and cameras may disperse directions to lost tourists, perform directory lookups in the office lobby, or contact the proper authorities in case of an emergency. To be effective, these systems will need to embrace human subtleties while interacting with people in their natural conditions. Computer vision and machine learning techniques have recently become adept at solving face and gesture tasks using posed datasets in controlled conditions. However, spontaneous human behavior under unconstrained conditions, or in the wild, is more complex and is subject to considerable variability from one person to the next. Uncontrolled conditions such as lighting, resolution, noise, occlusions, pose, and temporal variations complicate the matter further. This thesis advances the field of face and gesture analysis by introducing a new machine learning framework based upon dimensionality reduction and sparse representations that is shown to be robust in posed as well as natural conditions. Dimensionality reduction methods take complex objects, such as facial images, and attempt to learn lower dimensional representations embedded in the higher dimensional data. These alternate feature spaces are computationally more efficient and often more discriminative. The performance of various dimensionality reduction methods on geometric and appearance based facial attributes are studied leading to robust facial pose and expression recognition models. The parsimonious nature of sparse representations (SR) has successfully been exploited for the development of highly accurate classifiers for various applications. Despite the successes of SR techniques, large dictionaries and high dimensional data can make these classifiers computationally demanding. Further, sparse classifiers are subject to the adverse effects of a phenomenon known as coefficient contamination, where for example variations in pose may affect identity and expression recognition. This thesis analyzes the interaction between dimensionality reduction and sparse representations to present a unified sparse representation classification framework that addresses both issues of computational complexity and coefficient contamination. Semi-supervised dimensionality reduction is shown to mitigate the coefficient contamination problems associated with SR classifiers. The combination of semi-supervised dimensionality reduction with SR systems forms the cornerstone for a new face and gesture framework called Manifold based Sparse Representations (MSR). MSR is shown to deliver state-of-the-art facial understanding capabilities. To demonstrate the applicability of MSR to new domains, MSR is expanded to include temporal dynamics. The joint optimization of dimensionality reduction and SRs for classification purposes is a relatively new field. The combination of both concepts into a single objective function produce a relation that is neither convex, nor directly solvable. This thesis studies this problem to introduce a new jointly optimized framework. This framework, termed LGE-KSVD, utilizes variants of Linear extension of Graph Embedding (LGE) along with modified K-SVD dictionary learning to jointly learn the dimensionality reduction matrix, sparse representation dictionary, sparse coefficients, and sparsity-based classifier. By injecting LGE concepts directly into the K-SVD learning procedure, this research removes the support constraints K-SVD imparts on dictionary element discovery. Results are shown for facial recognition, facial expression recognition, human activity analysis, and with the addition of a concept called active difference signatures, delivers robust gesture recognition from Kinect or similar depth cameras

Robust Image Recognition Based on a New Supervised Kernel Subspace Learning Method

Fecha de lectura de Tesis Doctoral: 13 de septiembre 2019Image recognition is a term for computer technologies that can recognize certain people, objects or other targeted subjects through the use of algorithms and machine learning concepts. Face recognition is one of the most popular techniques to achieve the goal of figuring out the identity of a person. This study has been conducted to develop a new non-linear subspace learning method named “supervised kernel locality-based discriminant neighborhood embedding,” which performs data classification by learning an optimum embedded subspace from a principal high dimensional space. In this approach, not only is a nonlinear and complex variation of face images effectively represented using nonlinear kernel mapping, but local structure information of data from the same class and discriminant information from distinct classes are also simultaneously preserved to further improve final classification performance. Moreover, to evaluate the robustness of the proposed method, it was compared with several well-known pattern recognition methods through comprehensive experiments with six publicly accessible datasets. In this research, we particularly focus on face recognition however, two other types of databases rather than face databases are also applied to well investigate the implementation of our algorithm. Experimental results reveal that our method consistently outperforms its competitors across a wide range of dimensionality on all the datasets. SKLDNE method has reached 100 percent of recognition rate for Tn=17 on the Sheffield, 9 on the Yale, 8 on the ORL, 7 on the Finger vein and 11on the Finger Knuckle respectively, while the results are much lower for other methods. This demonstrates the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed method

A comparative analysis of neural and statistical classifiers for dimensionality reduction-based face recognition systems.

Human face recognition has received a wide range of attention since 1990s. Recent approaches focus on a combination of dimensionality reduction-based feature extraction algorithms and various types of classifiers. This thesis provides an in depth comparative analysis of neural and statistical classifiers by combining them with existing dimensionality reduction-based algorithms. A set of unified face recognition systems were established for evaluating alternate combinations in terms of recognition performance, processing time, and conditions to achieve certain performance levels. A preprocessing system and four dimensionality reduction-based methods based on Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Two-dimensional PCA, Fisher\u27s Linear Discriminant and Laplacianfaces were utilized and implemented. Classification was achieved by using various types of classifiers including Euclidean Distance, MLP neural network, K-nearest-neighborhood classifier and Fuzzy K-Nearest Neighbor classifier. The statistical model is relatively simple and requires less computation complexity and storage. Experimental results were shown after the algorithms were tested on two databases of known individuals, Yale and AR database. After comparing these algorithms in every aspect, the results of the simulations showed that considering recognition rates, generalization ability, classification performance, the power of noise immunity and processing time, the best results were obtained with the Laplacianfaces, using either Fuzzy K-NN.Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2006 .X86. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 45-01, page: 0428. Thesis (M.A.Sc.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2006

Support vector machines to detect physiological patterns for EEG and EMG-based human-computer interaction:a review

Support vector machines (SVMs) are widely used classifiers for detecting physiological patterns in human-computer interaction (HCI). Their success is due to their versatility, robustness and large availability of free dedicated toolboxes. Frequently in the literature, insufficient details about the SVM implementation and/or parameters selection are reported, making it impossible to reproduce study analysis and results. In order to perform an optimized classification and report a proper description of the results, it is necessary to have a comprehensive critical overview of the applications of SVM. The aim of this paper is to provide a review of the usage of SVM in the determination of brain and muscle patterns for HCI, by focusing on electroencephalography (EEG) and electromyography (EMG) techniques. In particular, an overview of the basic principles of SVM theory is outlined, together with a description of several relevant literature implementations. Furthermore, details concerning reviewed papers are listed in tables and statistics of SVM use in the literature are presented. Suitability of SVM for HCI is discussed and critical comparisons with other classifiers are reported

Computational intelligence approaches to robotics, automation, and control [Volume guest editors]

No abstract available

Acoustic Approaches to Gender and Accent Identification

There has been considerable research on the problems of speaker and language recognition from samples of speech. A less researched problem is that of accent recognition. Although this is a similar problem to language identification, di�erent accents of a language exhibit more fine-grained di�erences between classes than languages. This presents a tougher problem for traditional classification techniques. In this thesis, we propose and evaluate a number of techniques for gender and accent classification. These techniques are novel modifications and extensions to state of the art algorithms, and they result in enhanced performance on gender and accent recognition. The first part of the thesis focuses on the problem of gender identification, and presents a technique that gives improved performance in situations where training and test conditions are mismatched. The bulk of this thesis is concerned with the application of the i-Vector technique to accent identification, which is the most successful approach to acoustic classification to have emerged in recent years. We show that it is possible to achieve high accuracy accent identification without reliance on transcriptions and without utilising phoneme recognition algorithms. The thesis describes various stages in the development of i-Vector based accent classification that improve the standard approaches usually applied for speaker or language identification, which are insu�cient. We demonstrate that very good accent identification performance is possible with acoustic methods by considering di�erent i-Vector projections, frontend parameters, i-Vector configuration parameters, and an optimised fusion of the resulting i-Vector classifiers we can obtain from the same data. We claim to have achieved the best accent identification performance on the test corpus for acoustic methods, with up to 90% identification rate. This performance is even better than previously reported acoustic-phonotactic based systems on the same corpus, and is very close to performance obtained via transcription based accent identification. Finally, we demonstrate that the utilization of our techniques for speech recognition purposes leads to considerably lower word error rates. Keywords: Accent Identification, Gender Identification, Speaker Identification, Gaussian Mixture Model, Support Vector Machine, i-Vector, Factor Analysis, Feature Extraction, British English, Prosody, Speech Recognition

Impact evaluation of skin color, gender, and hair on the performance of eigenface, ICA, and, CNN methods

Project Work presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Information Management, specialization in Knowledge Management and Business IntelligenceAlthough face recognition has made remarkable progress in the past decades, it is still a challenging area. In addition to traditional flaws (such as illumination, pose, occlusion in part of face image), the low performance of the system with dark skin images and female faces raises questions that challenge transparency and accountability of the system. Recent work has suggested that available datasets are causing this issue, but little work has been done with other face recognition methods. Also, little work has been done on facial features such as hair as a key face feature in the face recognition system. To address the gaps this thesis examines the performance of three face recognition methods (eigenface, Independent Component Analysis (ICA) and Convolution Neuron Network (CNN)) with respect to skin color changes in two different face mode “only face” and “face with hair”. The following work is reported in this study, 1st rebuild approximate PPB dataset based on work done by “Joy Adowaa Buolamwini” in her thesis entitled “Gender shades”. 2nd new classifier tools developed, and the approximate PPB dataset classified based on new methods in 12 classes. 3rd the three methods assessed with approximate PPB dataset in two face mode. The evaluation of the three methods revealed an interesting result. In this work, the eigenface method performs better than ICA and CNN. Moreover, the result shows a strong positive correlation between the numbers of train sets and results that it can prove the previous finding about lack of image with dark skin. More interestingly, despite the claims, the models showed a proactive behavior in female’s face identification. Despite the female group shape 21% of the population in the top two skin type groups, the result shows 44% of the top 3 recall for female groups. Also, it confirms that adding hair to images in average boosts the results by up to 9%. The work concludes with a discussion of the results and recommends the impact of classes on each other for future stud