Effective Adapter for Face Recognition in the Wild

In this paper, we tackle the challenge of face recognition in the wild, where images often suffer from low quality and real-world distortions. Traditional heuristic approaches-either training models directly on these degraded images or their enhanced counterparts using face restoration techniques-have proven ineffective, primarily due to the degradation of facial features and the discrepancy in image domains. To overcome these issues, we propose an effective adapter for augmenting existing face recognition models trained on high-quality facial datasets. The key of our adapter is to process both the unrefined and the enhanced images by two similar structures where one is fixed and the other trainable. Such design can confer two benefits. First, the dual-input system minimizes the domain gap while providing varied perspectives for the face recognition model, where the enhanced image can be regarded as a complex non-linear transformation of the original one by the restoration model. Second, both two similar structures can be initialized by the pre-trained models without dropping the past knowledge. The extensive experiments in zero-shot settings show the effectiveness of our method by surpassing baselines of about 3%, 4%, and 7% in three datasets. Our code will be publicly available at https://github.com/liuyunhaozz/FaceAdapter/.

PAD-Phys: Exploiting Physiology for Presentation Attack Detection in Face Biometrics

Presentation Attack Detection (PAD) is a crucial stage in facial recognition systems to avoid leakage of personal information or spoofing of identity to entities. Recently, pulse detection based on remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) has been shown to be effective in face presentation attack detection. This work presents three different approaches to the presentation attack detection based on rPPG: (i) The physiological domain, a domain using rPPG-based models, (ii) the Deepfakes domain, a domain where models were retrained from the physiological domain to specific Deepfakes detection tasks; and (iii) a new Presentation Attack domain was trained by applying transfer learning from the two previous domains to improve the capability to differentiate between bona-fides and attacks. The results show the efficiency of the rPPG-based models for presentation attack detection, evidencing a 21.70% decrease in average classification error rate (ACER) (from 41.03% to 19.32%) when the presentation attack domain is compared to the physiological and Deepfakes domains. Our experiments highlight the efficiency of transfer learning in rPPG-based models and perform well in presentation attack detection in instruments that do not allow copying of this physiological feature.

AI-Based Facial Emotion Recognition Solutions for Education: A Study of Teacher-User and Other Categories

Existing information on AI-based facial emotion recognition (FER) is not easily comprehensible by those outside the field of computer science, requiring cross-disciplinary effort to determine a categorisation framework that promotes the understanding of this technology, and its impact on users. Most proponents classify FER in terms of methodology, implementation and analysis; relatively few by its application in education; and none by its users. This paper is concerned primarily with (potential) teacher-users of FER tools for education. It proposes a three-part classification of these teachers, by orientation, condition and preference, based on a classical taxonomy of affective educational objectives, and related theories. It also compiles and organises the types of FER solutions found in or inferred from the literature into "technology" and "applications" categories, as a prerequisite for structuring the proposed "teacher-user" category. This work has implications for proponents', critics', and users' understanding of the relationship between teachers and FER.

Multimodal Stress Detection Using Facial Landmarks and Biometric Signals

The development of various sensing technologies is improving measurements of stress and the well-being of individuals. Although progress has been made with single signal modalities like wearables and facial emotion recognition, integrating multiple modalities provides a more comprehensive understanding of stress, given that stress manifests differently across different people. Multi-modal learning aims to capitalize on the strength of each modality rather than relying on a single signal. Given the complexity of processing and integrating high-dimensional data from limited subjects, more research is needed. Numerous research efforts have been focused on fusing stress and emotion signals at an early stage, e.g., feature-level fusion using basic machine learning methods and 1D-CNN Methods. This paper proposes a multi-modal learning approach for stress detection that integrates facial landmarks and biometric signals. We test this multi-modal integration with various early-fusion and late-fusion techniques to integrate the 1D-CNN model from biometric signals and 2-D CNN using facial landmarks. We evaluate these architectures using a rigorous test of models' generalizability using the leave-one-subject-out mechanism, i.e., all samples related to a single subject are left out to train the model. Our findings show that late-fusion achieved 94.39\% accuracy, and early-fusion surpassed it with a 98.38\% accuracy rate. This research contributes valuable insights into enhancing stress detection through a multi-modal approach. The proposed research offers important knowledge in improving stress detection using a multi-modal approach.

Enhancing Mobile Privacy and Security: A Face Skin Patch-Based Anti-Spoofing Approach

As Facial Recognition System(FRS) is widely applied in areas such as access control and mobile payments due to its convenience and high accuracy. The security of facial recognition is also highly regarded. The Face anti-spoofing system(FAS) for face recognition is an important component used to enhance the security of face recognition systems. Traditional FAS used images containing identity information to detect spoofing traces, however there is a risk of privacy leakage during the transmission and storage of these images. Besides, the encryption and decryption of these privacy-sensitive data takes too long compared to inference time by FAS model. To address the above issues, we propose a face anti-spoofing algorithm based on facial skin patches leveraging pure facial skin patch images as input, which contain no privacy information, no encryption or decryption is needed for these images. We conduct experiments on several public datasets, the results prove that our algorithm has demonstrated superiority in both accuracy and speed.

Is Facial Recognition Biased at Near-Infrared Spectrum As Well?

Published academic research and media articles suggest face recognition is biased across demographics. Specifically, unequal performance is obtained for women, dark-skinned people, and older adults. However, these published studies have examined the bias of facial recognition in the visible spectrum (VIS). Factors such as facial makeup, facial hair, skin color, and illumination variation have been attributed to the bias of this technology at the VIS. The near-infrared (NIR) spectrum offers an advantage over the VIS in terms of robustness to factors such as illumination changes, facial makeup, and skin color. Therefore, it is worthwhile to investigate the bias of facial recognition at the near-infrared spectrum (NIR). This first study investigates the bias of the face recognition systems at the NIR spectrum. To this aim, two popular NIR facial image datasets namely, CASIA-Face-Africa and Notre-Dame-NIVL consisting of African and Caucasian subjects, respectively, are used to investigate the bias of facial recognition technology across gender and race. Interestingly, experimental results suggest equitable face recognition performance across gender and race at the NIR spectrum.

GAN-based Algorithm for Efficient Image Inpainting

Global pandemic due to the spread of COVID-19 has post challenges in a new dimension on facial recognition, where people start to wear masks. Under such condition, the authors consider utilizing machine learning in image inpainting to tackle the problem, by complete the possible face that is originally covered in mask. In particular, autoencoder has great potential on retaining important, general features of the image as well as the generative power of the generative adversarial network (GAN). The authors implement a combination of the two models, context encoders and explain how it combines the power of the two models and train the model with 50,000 images of influencers faces and yields a solid result that still contains space for improvements. Furthermore, the authors discuss some shortcomings with the model, their possible improvements, as well as some area of study for future investigation for applicative perspective, as well as directions to further enhance and refine the model.

Improving Unimodal Inference with Multimodal Transformers

This paper proposes an approach for improving performance of unimodal models with multimodal training. Our approach involves a multi-branch architecture that incorporates unimodal models with a multimodal transformer-based branch. By co-training these branches, the stronger multimodal branch can transfer its knowledge to the weaker unimodal branches through a multi-task objective, thereby improving the performance of the resulting unimodal models. We evaluate our approach on tasks of dynamic hand gesture recognition based on RGB and Depth, audiovisual emotion recognition based on speech and facial video, and audio-video-text based sentiment analysis. Our approach outperforms the conventionally trained unimodal counterparts. Interestingly, we also observe that optimization of the unimodal branches improves the multimodal branch, compared to a similar multimodal model trained from scratch.

Class Attendance System in Education with Deep Learning Method

With the advancing technology, the hardware gain of computers and the increase in the processing capacity of processors have facilitated the processing of instantaneous and real-time images. Face recognition processes are also studies in the field of image processing. Facial recognition processes are frequently used in security applications and commercial applications. Especially in the last 20 years, the high performances of artificial intelligence (AI) studies have contributed to the spread of these studies in many different fields. Education is one of them. The potential and advantages of using AI in education; can be grouped under three headings: student, teacher, and institution. One of the institutional studies may be the security of educational environments and the contribution of automation to education and training processes. From this point of view, deep learning methods, one of the sub-branches of AI, were used in this study. For object detection from images, a pioneering study has been designed and successfully implemented to keep records of students' entrance to the educational institution and to perform class attendance with images taken from the camera using image processing algorithms. The application of the study to real-life problems will be carried out in a school determined in the 2022-2023 academic year.

Can CNNs Accurately Classify Human Emotions? A Deep-Learning Facial Expression Recognition Study

Emotional Artificial Intelligences are currently one of the most anticipated developments of AI. If successful, these AIs will be classified as one of the most complex, intelligent nonhuman entities as they will possess sentience, the primary factor that distinguishes living humans and mechanical machines. For AIs to be classified as "emotional," they should be able to empathize with others and classify their emotions because without such abilities they cannot normally interact with humans. This study investigates the CNN model's ability to recognize and classify human facial expressions (positive, neutral, negative). The CNN model made for this study is programmed in Python and trained with preprocessed data from the Chicago Face Database. The model is intentionally designed with less complexity to further investigate its ability. We hypothesized that the model will perform better than chance (33.3%) in classifying each emotion class of input data. The model accuracy was tested with novel images. Accuracy was summarized in a percentage report, comparative plot, and confusion matrix. Results of this study supported the hypothesis as the model had 75% accuracy over 10,000 images (data), highlighting the possibility of AIs that accurately analyze human emotions and the prospect of viable Emotional AIs.