A Sparse and Locally Coherent Morphable Face Model for Dense Semantic Correspondence Across Heterogeneous 3D Faces

The 3D Morphable Model (3DMM) is a powerful statistical tool for representing 3D face shapes. To build a 3DMM, a training set of face scans in full point-to-point correspondence is required, and its modeling capabilities directly depend on the variability contained in the training data. Thus, to increase the descriptive power of the 3DMM, establishing a dense correspondence across heterogeneous scans with sufficient diversity in terms of identities, ethnicities, or expressions becomes essential. In this manuscript, we present a fully automatic approach that leverages a 3DMM to transfer its dense semantic annotation across raw 3D faces, establishing a dense correspondence between them. We propose a novel formulation to learn a set of sparse deformation components with local support on the face that, together with an original non-rigid deformation algorithm, allow the 3DMM to precisely fit unseen faces and transfer its semantic annotation. We extensively experimented our approach, showing it can effectively generalize to highly diverse samples and accurately establish a dense correspondence even in presence of complex facial expressions. The accuracy of the dense registration is demonstrated by building a heterogeneous, large-scale 3DMM from more than 9,000 fully registered scans obtained by joining three large datasets together

Space-time Zernike Moments and Pyramid Kernel Descriptors for Action Classification

Action recognition in videos is a relevant and challenging task of automatic semantic video analysis. Most successful approaches exploit local space-time descriptors. These descriptors are usually carefully engineered in order to obtain feature invariance to photometric and geometric variations. The main drawback of space-time descriptors is high dimensionality and efficiency. In this paper we propose a novel descriptor based on 3D Zernike moments computed for space-time patches. Moments are by construction not redundant and therefore optimal for compactness. Given the hierarchical structure of our descriptor we propose a novel similarity procedure that exploits this structure comparing features as pyramids. The approach is tested on a public dataset and compared with state-of-the art descriptors

Forgery detection from printed images: a tool in crime scene analysis

.The preliminary analysis of the genuineness of a photo is become, in the time, the first step of any forensic examination that involves images, in case there is not a certainty of its intrinsic authenticity. Digital cameras have largely replaced film based devices, till some years ago, in some areas (countries) just images made from film negatives where considered fully reliable in Court. There was a widespread prejudicial thought regarding a digital image which, according to some people, it cannot ever been considered a legal proof, since its “inconsistent digital nature”. Great efforts have been made by the forensic science community on this field and now, after all this year, different approaches have been unveiled to discover and declare possible malicious frauds, thus to establish whereas an image is authentic or not or, at least, to assess a certain degree of probability of its “pureness”. Nowadays it’s an easy practice to manipulate digital images by using powerful photo editing tools. In order to alter the original meaning of the image, copy-move forgery is the one of the most common ways of manipulating the contents. With this technique a portion of the image is copied and pasted once or more times elsewhere into the same image to hide something or change the real meaning of it. Whenever a digital image (or a printed image) will be presented as an evidence into a Court, it should be followed the criteria to analyze the document with a forensic approach to determine if it contains traces of manipulation. Image forensics literature offers several examples of detectors for such manipulation and, among them, the most recent and effective ones are those based on Zernike moments and those based on Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT). In particular, the capability of SIFT to discover correspondences among similar visual contents allows the forensic analysis to detect even very accurate and realistic copy-move forgeries. In some situation, however, instead of a digital document only its analog version may be available. It is interesting to ask whether it is possible to identify tampering from a printed picture rather than its digital counterpart. Scanned documents or recaptured printed documents by a digital camera are widely used in a number of different scenarios, from medical imaging, law enforcement to banking and daily consumer use. So, in this paper, the problem of identifying copy-move forgery from a printed picture is investigated. The copy-move manipulation is detected by proving the presence of copy-move patches in the scanned image by using the tool, named CADET (Cloned Area DETector), based on our previous methodology which has been adapted in a version tailored for printed image case (e.g. choice of the minimum number of matched keypoints, size of the input image, etc.) In this paper a real case of murder is presented, where an image of a crime scene, submitted as a printed documentary evidence, had been modified by the defense advisors to reject the theory of accusation given by the Prosecutor. The goal of this paper is to experimentally investigate the requirement set under which reliable copy-move forgery detection is possible on printed images, in that way the forgery test is the very first step of an appropriate operational check list manual

Level Set Methods in an EM Framework for Shape Classification and Estimation

Abstract. In this paper, we propose an Expectation-Maximization (EM) approach to separate a shape database into different shape classes, while simultaneously estimating the shape contours that best exemplify each of the different shape classes. We begin our formulation by employ-ing the level set function as the shape descriptor. Next, for each shape class we assume that there exists an unknown underlying level set func-tion whose zero level set describes the contour that best represents the shapes within that shape class. The level set function for each exam-ple shape is modeled as a noisy measurement of the appropriate shape class’s unknown underlying level set function. Based on this measure-ment model and the judicious introduction of the class labels as hidden data, our EM formulation calculates the labels for shape classification and estimates the shape contours that best typify the different shape classes. This resulting iterative algorithm is computationally efficient, simple, and accurate. We demonstrate the utility and performance of this algorithm by applying it to two medical applications.