7th ABAW Competition: Multi-Task Learning and Compound Expression Recognition

This paper describes the 7th Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) Competition, which is part of the respective Workshop held in conjunction with ECCV 2024. The 7th ABAW Competition addresses novel challenges in understanding human expressions and behaviors, crucial for the development of human-centered technologies. The Competition comprises of two sub-challenges: i) Multi-Task Learning (the goal is to learn at the same time, in a multi-task learning setting, to estimate two continuous affect dimensions, valence and arousal, to recognise between the mutually exclusive classes of the 7 basic expressions and 'other'), and to detect 12 Action Units); and ii) Compound Expression Recognition (the target is to recognise between the 7 mutually exclusive compound expression classes). s-Aff-Wild2, which is a static version of the A/V Aff-Wild2 database and contains annotations for valence-arousal, expressions and Action Units, is utilized for the purposes of the Multi-Task Learning Challenge; a part of C-EXPR-DB, which is an A/V in-the-wild database with compound expression annotations, is utilized for the purposes of the Compound Expression Recognition Challenge. In this paper, we introduce the two challenges, detailing their datasets and the protocols followed for each. We also outline the evaluation metrics, and highlight the baseline systems and their results. Additional information about the competition can be found at \url{https://affective-behavior-analysis-in-the-wild.github.io/7th}.

Conditional Distribution Modelling for Few-Shot Image Synthesis with Diffusion Models

Few-shot image synthesis entails generating diverse and realistic images of novel categories using only a few example images. While multiple recent efforts in this direction have achieved impressive results, the existing approaches are dependent only upon the few novel samples available at test time in order to generate new images, which restricts the diversity of the generated images. To overcome this limitation, we propose Conditional Distribution Modelling (CDM) -- a framework which effectively utilizes Diffusion models for few-shot image generation. By modelling the distribution of the latent space used to condition a Diffusion process, CDM leverages the learnt statistics of the training data to get a better approximation of the unseen class distribution, thereby removing the bias arising due to limited number of few shot samples. Simultaneously, we devise a novel inversion based optimization strategy that further improves the approximated unseen class distribution, and ensures the fidelity of the generated samples to the unseen class. The experimental results on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed CDM for few-shot generation.

Real, fake and synthetic faces -- does the coin have three sides?

With the ever-growing power of generative artificial intelligence, deepfake and artificially generated (synthetic) media have continued to spread online, which creates various ethical and moral concerns regarding their usage. To tackle this, we thus present a novel exploration of the trends and patterns observed in real, deepfake and synthetic facial images. The proposed analysis is done in two parts: firstly, we incorporate eight deep learning models and analyze their performances in distinguishing between the three classes of images. Next, we look to further delve into the similarities and differences between these three sets of images by investigating their image properties both in the context of the entire image as well as in the context of specific regions within the image. ANOVA test was also performed and provided further clarity amongst the patterns associated between the images of the three classes. From our findings, we observe that the investigated deeplearning models found it easier to detect synthetic facial images, with the ViT Patch-16 model performing best on this task with a class-averaged sensitivity, specificity, precision, and accuracy of 97.37%, 98.69%, 97.48%, and 98.25%, respectively. This observation was supported by further analysis of various image properties. We saw noticeable differences across the three category of images. This analysis can help us build better algorithms for facial image generation, and also shows that synthetic, deepfake and real face images are indeed three different classes.

Generation and Detection of Sign Language Deepfakes -- A Linguistic and Visual Analysis

A question in the realm of deepfakes is slowly emerging pertaining to whether we can go beyond facial deepfakes and whether it would be beneficial to society. Therefore, this research presents a positive application of deepfake technology in upper body generation, while performing sign-language for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHoH) community. The resulting videos are later vetted with a sign language expert. This is particularly helpful, given the intricate nature of sign language, a scarcity of sign language experts, and potential benefits for health and education. The objectives of this work encompass constructing a reliable deepfake dataset, evaluating its technical and visual credibility through computer vision and natural language processing models, and assessing the plausibility of the generated content. With over 1200 videos, featuring both previously seen and unseen individuals for the generation model, using the help of a sign language expert, we establish a deepfake dataset in sign language that can further be utilized to detect fake videos that may target certain people of determination.

GTA-HDR: A Large-Scale Synthetic Dataset for HDR Image Reconstruction

High Dynamic Range (HDR) content (i.e., images and videos) has a broad range of applications. However, capturing HDR content from real-world scenes is expensive and time-consuming. Therefore, the challenging task of reconstructing visually accurate HDR images from their Low Dynamic Range (LDR) counterparts is gaining attention in the vision research community. A major challenge in this research problem is the lack of datasets, which capture diverse scene conditions (e.g., lighting, shadows, weather, locations, landscapes, objects, humans, buildings) and various image features (e.g., color, contrast, saturation, hue, luminance, brightness, radiance). To address this gap, in this paper, we introduce GTA-HDR, a large-scale synthetic dataset of photo-realistic HDR images sampled from the GTA-V video game. We perform thorough evaluation of the proposed dataset, which demonstrates significant qualitative and quantitative improvements of the state-of-the-art HDR image reconstruction methods. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed dataset and its impact on additional computer vision tasks including 3D human pose estimation, human body part segmentation, and holistic scene segmentation. The dataset, data collection pipeline, and evaluation code are available at: https://github.com/HrishavBakulBarua/GTA-HDR.

HistoHDR-Net: Histogram Equalization for Single LDR to HDR Image Translation

High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging aims to replicate the high visual quality and clarity of real-world scenes. Due to the high costs associated with HDR imaging, the literature offers various data-driven methods for HDR image reconstruction from Low Dynamic Range (LDR) counterparts. A common limitation of these approaches is missing details in regions of the reconstructed HDR images, which are over- or under-exposed in the input LDR images. To this end, we propose a simple and effective method, HistoHDR-Net, to recover the fine details (e.g., color, contrast, saturation, and brightness) of HDR images via a fusion-based approach utilizing histogram-equalized LDR images along with self-attention guidance. Our experiments demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach over the state-of-art methods.

DiffAugment: Diffusion based Long-Tailed Visual Relationship Recognition

The task of Visual Relationship Recognition (VRR) aims to identify relationships between two interacting objects in an image and is particularly challenging due to the widely-spread and highly imbalanced distribution of <subject, relation, object> triplets. To overcome the resultant performance bias in existing VRR approaches, we introduce DiffAugment -- a method which first augments the tail classes in the linguistic space by making use of WordNet and then utilizes the generative prowess of Diffusion Models to expand the visual space for minority classes. We propose a novel hardness-aware component in diffusion which is based upon the hardness of each <S,R,O> triplet and demonstrate the effectiveness of hardness-aware diffusion in generating visual embeddings for the tail classes. We also propose a novel subject and object based seeding strategy for diffusion sampling which improves the discriminative capability of the generated visual embeddings. Extensive experimentation on the GQA-LT dataset shows favorable gains in the subject/object and relation average per-class accuracy using Diffusion augmented samples.

AV-Deepfake1M: A Large-Scale LLM-Driven Audio-Visual Deepfake Dataset

The detection and localization of highly realistic deepfake audio-visual content are challenging even for the most advanced state-of-the-art methods. While most of the research efforts in this domain are focused on detecting high-quality deepfake images and videos, only a few works address the problem of the localization of small segments of audio-visual manipulations embedded in real videos. In this research, we emulate the process of such content generation and propose the AV-Deepfake1M dataset. The dataset contains content-driven (i) video manipulations, (ii) audio manipulations, and (iii) audio-visual manipulations for more than 2K subjects resulting in a total of more than 1M videos. The paper provides a thorough description of the proposed data generation pipeline accompanied by a rigorous analysis of the quality of the generated data. The comprehensive benchmark of the proposed dataset utilizing state-of-the-art deepfake detection and localization methods indicates a significant drop in performance compared to previous datasets. The proposed dataset will play a vital role in building the next-generation deepfake localization methods. The dataset and associated code are available at https://github.com/ControlNet/AV-Deepfake1M .

MAGIC-TBR: Multiview Attention Fusion for Transformer-based Bodily Behavior Recognition in Group Settings

Bodily behavioral language is an important social cue, and its automated analysis helps in enhancing the understanding of artificial intelligence systems. Furthermore, behavioral language cues are essential for active engagement in social agent-based user interactions. Despite the progress made in computer vision for tasks like head and body pose estimation, there is still a need to explore the detection of finer behaviors such as gesturing, grooming, or fumbling. This paper proposes a multiview attention fusion method named MAGIC-TBR that combines features extracted from videos and their corresponding Discrete Cosine Transform coefficients via a transformer-based approach. The experiments are conducted on the BBSI dataset and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed feature fusion with multiview attention. The code is available at: https://github.com/surbhimadan92/MAGIC-TBR

ArtHDR-Net: Perceptually Realistic and Accurate HDR Content Creation

High Dynamic Range (HDR) content creation has become an important topic for modern media and entertainment sectors, gaming and Augmented/Virtual Reality industries. Many methods have been proposed to recreate the HDR counterparts of input Low Dynamic Range (LDR) images/videos given a single exposure or multi-exposure LDRs. The state-of-the-art methods focus primarily on the preservation of the reconstruction's structural similarity and the pixel-wise accuracy. However, these conventional approaches do not emphasize preserving the artistic intent of the images in terms of human visual perception, which is an essential element in media, entertainment and gaming. In this paper, we attempt to study and fill this gap. We propose an architecture called ArtHDR-Net based on a Convolutional Neural Network that uses multi-exposed LDR features as input. Experimental results show that ArtHDR-Net can achieve state-of-the-art performance in terms of the HDR-VDP-2 score (i.e., mean opinion score index) while reaching competitive performance in terms of PSNR and SSIM.