Face Attribute Prediction Using Off-the-Shelf CNN Features

Predicting attributes from face images in the wild is a challenging computer vision problem. To automatically describe face attributes from face containing images, traditionally one needs to cascade three technical blocks --- face localization, facial descriptor construction, and attribute classification --- in a pipeline. As a typical classification problem, face attribute prediction has been addressed using deep learning. Current state-of-the-art performance was achieved by using two cascaded Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), which were specifically trained to learn face localization and attribute description. In this paper, we experiment with an alternative way of employing the power of deep representations from CNNs. Combining with conventional face localization techniques, we use off-the-shelf architectures trained for face recognition to build facial descriptors. Recognizing that the describable face attributes are diverse, our face descriptors are constructed from different levels of the CNNs for different attributes to best facilitate face attribute prediction. Experiments on two large datasets, LFWA and CelebA, show that our approach is entirely comparable to the state-of-the-art. Our findings not only demonstrate an efficient face attribute prediction approach, but also raise an important question: how to leverage the power of off-the-shelf CNN representations for novel tasks.Comment: In proceeding of 2016 International Conference on Biometrics (ICB

Leveraging Mid-Level Deep Representations For Predicting Face Attributes in the Wild

Predicting facial attributes from faces in the wild is very challenging due to pose and lighting variations in the real world. The key to this problem is to build proper feature representations to cope with these unfavourable conditions. Given the success of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) in image classification, the high-level CNN feature, as an intuitive and reasonable choice, has been widely utilized for this problem. In this paper, however, we consider the mid-level CNN features as an alternative to the high-level ones for attribute prediction. This is based on the observation that face attributes are different: some of them are locally oriented while others are globally defined. Our investigations reveal that the mid-level deep representations outperform the prediction accuracy achieved by the (fine-tuned) high-level abstractions. We empirically demonstrate that the midlevel representations achieve state-of-the-art prediction performance on CelebA and LFWA datasets. Our investigations also show that by utilizing the mid-level representations one can employ a single deep network to achieve both face recognition and attribute prediction.Comment: In proceedings of 2016 International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP