Beyond Disentangled Representations: An Attentive Angular Distillation Approach to Large-scale Lightweight Age-Invariant Face Recognition

Disentangled representations have been commonly adopted to Age-invariant Face Recognition (AiFR) tasks. However, these methods have reached some limitations with (1) the requirement of large-scale face recognition (FR) training data with age labels, which is limited in practice; (2) heavy deep network architecture for high performance; and (3) their evaluations are usually taken place on age-related face databases while neglecting the standard large-scale FR databases to guarantee its robustness. This work presents a novel Attentive Angular Distillation (AAD) approach to Large-scale Lightweight AiFR that overcomes these limitations. Given two high-performance heavy networks as teachers with different specialized knowledge, AAD introduces a learning paradigm to efficiently distill the age-invariant attentive and angular knowledge from those teachers to a lightweight student network making it more powerful with higher FR accuracy and robust against age factor. Consequently, AAD approach is able to take the advantages of both FR datasets with and without age labels to train an AiFR model. Far apart from prior distillation methods mainly focusing on accuracy and compression ratios in closed-set problems, our AAD aims to solve the open-set problem, i.e. large-scale face recognition. Evaluations on LFW, IJB-B and IJB-C Janus, AgeDB and MegaFace-FGNet with one million distractors have demonstrated the efficiency of the proposed approach. This work also presents a new longitudinal face aging (LogiFace) database for further studies in age-related facial problems in future.

Vec2Face: Unveil Human Faces from their Blackbox Features in Face Recognition

Unveiling face images of a subject given his/her high-level representations extracted from a blackbox Face Recognition engine is extremely challenging. It is because the limitations of accessible information from that engine including its structure and uninterpretable extracted features. This paper presents a novel generative structure with Bijective Metric Learning, namely Bijective Generative Adversarial Networks in a Distillation framework (DiBiGAN), for synthesizing faces of an identity given that person's features. In order to effectively address this problem, this work firstly introduces a bijective metric so that the distance measurement and metric learning process can be directly adopted in image domain for an image reconstruction task. Secondly, a distillation process is introduced to maximize the information exploited from the blackbox face recognition engine. Then a Feature-Conditional Generator Structure with Exponential Weighting Strategy is presented for a more robust generator that can synthesize realistic faces with ID preservation. Results on several benchmarking datasets including CelebA, LFW, AgeDB, CFP-FP against matching engines have demonstrated the effectiveness of DiBiGAN on both image realism and ID preservation properties.

Image Alignment in Unseen Domains via Domain Deep Generalization

Image alignment across domains has recently become one of the realistic and popular topics in the research community. In this problem, a deep learning-based image alignment method is usually trained on an available largescale database. During the testing steps, this trained model is deployed on unseen images collected under different camera conditions and modalities. The delivered deep network models are unable to be updated, adapted or fine-tuned in these scenarios. Thus, recent deep learning techniques, e.g. domain adaptation, feature transferring, and fine-tuning, are unable to be deployed. This paper presents a novel deep learning based approach to tackle the problem of across unseen modalities. The proposed network is then applied to image alignment as an illustration. The proposed approach is designed as an end-to-end deep convolutional neural network to optimize the deep models to improve the performance. The proposed network has been evaluated in digit recognition when the model is trained on MNIST and then tested on unseen domain MNIST-M. Finally, the proposed method is benchmarked in image alignment problem when training on RGB images and testing on Depth and X-Ray images.

Recognition in Unseen Domains: Domain Generalization via Universal Non-volume Preserving Models

Recognition across domains has recently become an active topic in the research community. However, it has been largely overlooked in the problem of recognition in new unseen domains. Under this condition, the delivered deep network models are unable to be updated, adapted or fine-tuned. Therefore, recent deep learning techniques, such as: domain adaptation, feature transferring, and fine-tuning, cannot be applied. This paper presents a novel approach to the problem of domain generalization in the context of deep learning. The proposed method is evaluated on different datasets in various problems, i.e. (i) digit recognition on MNIST, SVHN and MNIST-M, (ii) face recognition on Extended Yale-B, CMU-PIE and CMU-MPIE, and (iii) pedestrian recognition on RGB and Thermal image datasets. The experimental results show that our proposed method consistently improves the performance accuracy. It can be also easily incorporated with any other CNN frameworks within an end-to-end deep network design for object detection and recognition problems to improve their performance.

Defining Quantum Neural Networks via Quantum Time Evolution

This work presents a novel fundamental algorithm for for defining and training Neural Networks in Quantum Information based on time evolution and the Hamiltonian. Classical Neural Network algorithms (ANN) are computationally expensive. For example, in image classification, representing an image pixel by pixel using classical information requires an enormous amount of computational memory resources. Hence, exploring methods to represent images in a different paradigm of information is important. Quantum Neural Networks (QNNs) have been explored for over 20 years. The current forefront work based on Variational Quantum Circuits is specifically defined for the Continuous Variable (CV) Model of quantum computers. In this work, a model is proposed which is defined at a more fundamental level and hence can be inherited by any variants of quantum computing models. This work also presents a quantum backpropagation algorithm to train our QNN model and validate this algorithm on the MNIST dataset on a quantum computer simulation.

ShrinkTeaNet: Million-scale Lightweight Face Recognition via Shrinking Teacher-Student Networks

Large-scale face recognition in-the-wild has been recently achieved matured performance in many real work applications. However, such systems are built on GPU platforms and mostly deploy heavy deep network architectures. Given a high-performance heavy network as a teacher, this work presents a simple and elegant teacher-student learning paradigm, namely ShrinkTeaNet, to train a portable student network that has significantly fewer parameters and competitive accuracy against the teacher network. Far apart from prior teacher-student frameworks mainly focusing on accuracy and compression ratios in closed-set problems, our proposed teacher-student network is proved to be more robust against open-set problem, i.e. large-scale face recognition. In addition, this work introduces a novel Angular Distillation Loss for distilling the feature direction and the sample distributions of the teacher's hypersphere to its student. Then ShrinkTeaNet framework can efficiently guide the student's learning process with the teacher's knowledge presented in both intermediate and last stages of the feature embedding. Evaluations on LFW, CFP-FP, AgeDB, IJB-B and IJB-C Janus, and MegaFace with one million distractors have demonstrated the efficiency of the proposed approach to learn robust student networks which have satisfying accuracy and compact sizes. Our ShrinkTeaNet is able to support the light-weight architecture achieving high performance with 99.77% on LFW and 95.64% on large-scale Megaface protocols.

Generative Flow via Invertible nxn Convolution

Flow-based generative models have recently become one of the most efficient approaches to model the data generation. Indeed, they are constructed with a sequence of invertible and tractable transformations. Glow first introduced a simple type of generative flow using an invertible 1x1 convolution. However, the 1x1 convolution suffers from limited flexibility compared to the standard convolutions. In this paper, we propose a novel invertible nxn convolution approach that overcomes the limitations of the invertible 1x1 convolution. In addition, our proposed network is not only tractable and invertible but also uses fewer parameters than standard convolutions. The experiments on CIFAR-10, ImageNet, and Celeb-HQ datasets, have showed that our invertible nxn convolution helps to improve the performance of generative models significantly.

Image Processing in Quantum Computers

Quantum Image Processing (QIP) is an exiting new field showing a lot of promise. Expressing an image using quantum information would mean all of the unique quantum properties like superposition or entanglement can apply to the image. In this work, we explore and compare a number of quantum image models and then implement simulate a quantum image using a classical computer.

Beyond Domain Adaptation: Unseen Domain Encapsulation via Universal Non-volume Preserving Models

Recognition across domains has recently become an active topic in the research community. However, it has been largely overlooked in the problem of recognition in new unseen domains. Under this condition, the delivered deep network models are unable to be updated, adapted or fine-tuned. Therefore, recent deep learning techniques, such as: domain adaptation, feature transferring, and fine-tuning, cannot be applied. This paper presents a novel Universal Non-volume Preserving approach to the problem of domain generalization in the context of deep learning. The proposed method can be easily incorporated with any other ConvNet framework within an end-to-end deep network design to improve the performance. On digit recognition, we benchmark on four popular digit recognition databases, i.e. MNIST, USPS, SVHN and MNIST-M. The proposed method is also experimented on face recognition on Extended Yale-B, CMU-PIE and CMU-MPIE databases and compared against other the state-of-the-art methods. In the problem of pedestrian detection, we empirically observe that the proposed method learns models that improve performance across a priori unknown data distributions.

Non-Volume Preserving-based Feature Fusion Approach to Group-Level Expression Recognition on Crowd Videos

Group-level emotion recognition (ER) is a growing research area as the demands for assessing crowds of all sizes is becoming an interest in both the security arena and social media. This work investigates group-level expression recognition on crowd videos where information is not only aggregated across a variable length sequence of frames but also over the set of faces within each frame to produce aggregated recognition results. In this paper, we propose an effective deep feature level fusion mechanism to model the spatial-temporal information in the crowd videos. Furthermore, we extend our proposed NVP fusion mechanism to temporal NVP fussion appoarch to learn the temporal information between frames. In order to demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of each component in the proposed approach, three experiments were conducted: (i) evaluation on the AffectNet database to benchmark the proposed emoNet for recognizing facial expression; (ii) evaluation on EmotiW2018 to benchmark the proposed deep feature level fusion mechanism NVPF; and, (iii) examine the proposed TNVPF on an innovative Group-level Emotion on Crowd Videos (GECV) dataset composed of 627 videos collected from social media. GECV dataset is a collection of videos ranging in duration from 10 to 20 seconds of crowds of twenty (20) or more subjects and each video is labeled as positive, negative, or neutral.