Robust statistical frontalization of human and animal faces

The unconstrained acquisition of facial data in real-world conditions may result in face images with significant pose variations, illumination changes, and occlusions, affecting the performance of facial landmark localization and recognition methods. In this paper, a novel method, robust to pose, illumination variations, and occlusions is proposed for joint face frontalization and landmark localization. Unlike the state-of-the-art methods for landmark localization and pose correction, where large amount of manually annotated images or 3D facial models are required, the proposed method relies on a small set of frontal images only. By observing that the frontal facial image of both humans and animals, is the one having the minimum rank of all different poses, a model which is able to jointly recover the frontalized version of the face as well as the facial landmarks is devised. To this end, a suitable optimization problem is solved, concerning minimization of the nuclear norm (convex surrogate of the rank function) and the matrix ℓ1 norm accounting for occlusions. The proposed method is assessed in frontal view reconstruction of human and animal faces, landmark localization, pose-invariant face recognition, face verification in unconstrained conditions, and video inpainting by conducting experiment on 9 databases. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in comparison to the state-of-the-art methods for the target problems

FakePolisher: Making deepfakes more detection-evasive by shallow reconstruction

At this moment, GAN-based image generation methods are still imperfect, whose upsampling design has limitations in leaving some certain artifact patterns in the synthesized image. Such artifact patterns can be easily exploited (by recent methods) for difference detection of real and GAN-synthesized images. However, the existing detection methods put much emphasis on the artifact patterns, which can become futile if such artifact patterns were reduced. Towards reducing the artifacts in the synthesized images, in this paper, we devise a simple yet powerful approach termed FakePolisher that performs shallow reconstruction of fake images through a learned linear dictionary, intending to effectively and efficiently reduce the artifacts introduced during image synthesis. The comprehensive evaluation on 3 state-of-the-art DeepFake detection methods and fake images generated by 16 popular GAN-based fake image generation techniques, demonstrates the effectiveness of our technique.Overall, through reducing artifact patterns, our technique significantly reduces the accuracy of the 3 state-of-the-art fake image detection methods, i.e., 47% on average and up to 93% in the worst case.Comment: 9 pages, accepted by ACM MM 202

The Ninth Visual Object Tracking VOT2021 Challenge Results

The Visual Object Tracking challenge VOT2021 is the ninth annual tracker benchmarking activity organized by the VOT initiative. Results of 71 trackers are presented; many are state-of-the-art trackers published at major computer vision conferences or in journals in recent years. The VOT2021 challenge was composed of four sub-challenges focusing on different tracking domains: (i) VOT-ST2021 challenge focused on short-term tracking in RGB, (ii) VOT-RT2021 challenge focused on "real-time"short-term tracking in RGB, (iii) VOT-LT2021 focused on long-term tracking, namely coping with target disappearance and reappearance and (iv) VOT-RGBD2021 challenge focused on long-term tracking in RGB and depth imagery. The VOT-ST2021 dataset was refreshed, while VOT-RGBD2021 introduces a training dataset and sequestered dataset for winner identification. The source code for most of the trackers, the datasets, the evaluation kit and the results along with the source code for most trackers are publicly available at the challenge website1

Memristor devices for neural networks

Neural network technologies have taken center stage owing to their powerful computing capability for supporting deep learning in artificial intelligence. However, conventional synaptic devices such as SRAM and DRAM are not satisfactory solutions for neural networks. Recently, several types of memristor devices have become popular alternatives because of their outstanding characteristics such as scalability, high performance, and non-volatility. To understand the characteristics of memristors, a comparison among memristors has been made, considering both maturity and performance. Magneto-resistance random access memory, phase-change random access memory, and resistive random access memory among the proposed memristors are good candidates as synaptic devices for weight storage and matrixvector multiplication required in artificial neural networks (ANNs). Moreover, these devices play key roles as synaptic devices in research for bio-plausible spiking neural networks (SNNs) because their distinctive switching properties are well matched for emulating synaptic and neuron functions of biological neural networks. In this paper we review motivation, advantage, technology, and applications of memristor devices for neural networks from practical approaches of ANNs to futuristic research of SNNs, considering the current status of memristor technology