SqueezerFaceNet: Reducing a Small Face Recognition CNN Even More Via Filter Pruning

The widespread use of mobile devices for various digital services has created a need for reliable and real-time person authentication. In this context, facial recognition technologies have emerged as a dependable method for verifying users due to the prevalence of cameras in mobile devices and their integration into everyday applications. The rapid advancement of deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) has led to numerous face verification architectures. However, these models are often large and impractical for mobile applications, reaching sizes of hundreds of megabytes with millions of parameters. We address this issue by developing SqueezerFaceNet, a light face recognition network which less than 1M parameters. This is achieved by applying a network pruning method based on Taylor scores, where filters with small importance scores are removed iteratively. Starting from an already small network (of 1.24M) based on SqueezeNet, we show that it can be further reduced (up to 40%) without an appreciable loss in performance. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to evaluate network pruning methods for the task of face recognition.

Catching Elusive Depression via Facial Micro-Expression Recognition

Depression is a common mental health disorder that can cause consequential symptoms with continuously depressed mood that leads to emotional distress. One category of depression is Concealed Depression, where patients intentionally or unintentionally hide their genuine emotions through exterior optimism, thereby complicating and delaying diagnosis and treatment and leading to unexpected suicides. In this paper, we propose to diagnose concealed depression by using facial micro-expressions (FMEs) to detect and recognize underlying true emotions. However, the extremely low intensity and subtle nature of FMEs make their recognition a tough task. We propose a facial landmark-based Region-of-Interest (ROI) approach to address the challenge, and describe a low-cost and privacy-preserving solution that enables self-diagnosis using portable mobile devices in a personal setting (e.g., at home). We present results and findings that validate our method, and discuss other technical challenges and future directions in applying such techniques to real clinical settings.

LibreFace: An Open-Source Toolkit for Deep Facial Expression Analysis

Facial expression analysis is an important tool for human-computer interaction. In this paper, we introduce LibreFace, an open-source toolkit for facial expression analysis. This open-source toolbox offers real-time and offline analysis of facial behavior through deep learning models, including facial action unit (AU) detection, AU intensity estimation, and facial expression recognition. To accomplish this, we employ several techniques, including the utilization of a large-scale pre-trained network, feature-wise knowledge distillation, and task-specific fine-tuning. These approaches are designed to effectively and accurately analyze facial expressions by leveraging visual information, thereby facilitating the implementation of real-time interactive applications. In terms of Action Unit (AU) intensity estimation, we achieve a Pearson Correlation Coefficient (PCC) of 0.63 on DISFA, which is 7% higher than the performance of OpenFace 2.0 while maintaining highly-efficient inference that runs two times faster than OpenFace 2.0. Despite being compact, our model also demonstrates competitive performance to state-of-the-art facial expression analysis methods on AffecNet, FFHQ, and RAF-DB. Our code will be released at https://github.com/ihp-lab/LibreFace

CLIPER: A Unified Vision-Language Framework for In-the-Wild Facial Expression Recognition

Facial expression recognition (FER) is an essential task for understanding human behaviors. As one of the most informative behaviors of humans, facial expressions are often compound and variable, which is manifested by the fact that different people may express the same expression in very different ways. However, most FER methods still use one-hot or soft labels as the supervision, which lack sufficient semantic descriptions of facial expressions and are less interpretable. Recently, contrastive vision-language pre-training (VLP) models (e.g., CLIP) use text as supervision and have injected new vitality into various computer vision tasks, benefiting from the rich semantics in text. Therefore, in this work, we propose CLIPER, a unified framework for both static and dynamic facial Expression Recognition based on CLIP. Besides, we introduce multiple expression text descriptors (METD) to learn fine-grained expression representations that make CLIPER more interpretable. We conduct extensive experiments on several popular FER benchmarks and achieve state-of-the-art performance, which demonstrates the effectiveness of CLIPER.

Person Recognition using Facial Micro-Expressions with Deep Learning

This study investigates the efficacy of facial micro-expressions as a soft biometric for enhancing person recognition, aiming to broaden the understanding of the subject and its potential applications. We propose a deep learning approach designed to capture spatial semantics and motion at a fine temporal resolution. Experiments on three widely-used micro-expression databases demonstrate a notable increase in identification accuracy compared to existing benchmarks, highlighting the potential of integrating facial micro-expressions for improved person recognition across various fields.

Learning Full-Head 3D GANs from a Single-View Portrait Dataset

33D-aware face generators are commonly trained on 2D real-life face image datasets. Nevertheless, existing facial recognition methods often struggle to extract face data captured from various camera angles. Furthermore, in-the-wild images with diverse body poses introduce a high-dimensional challenge for 3D-aware generators, making it difficult to utilize data that contains complete neck and shoulder regions. Consequently, these face image datasets often contain only near-frontal face data, which poses challenges for 3D-aware face generators to construct \textit{full-head} 3D portraits. To this end, we first create the dataset {$\it{360}^{\circ}$}-\textit{Portrait}-\textit{HQ} (\textit{$\it{360}^{\circ}$PHQ}), which consists of high-quality single-view real portraits annotated with a variety of camera parameters {(the yaw angles span the entire $360^{\circ}$ range)} and body poses. We then propose \textit{3DPortraitGAN}, the first 3D-aware full-head portrait generator that learns a canonical 3D avatar distribution from the body-pose-various \textit{$\it{360}^{\circ}$PHQ} dataset with body pose self-learning. Our model can generate view-consistent portrait images from all camera angles (${360}^{\circ}$) with a full-head 3D representation. We incorporate a mesh-guided deformation field into volumetric rendering to produce deformed results to generate portrait images that conform to the body pose distribution of the dataset using our canonical generator. We integrate two pose predictors into our framework to predict more accurate body poses to address the issue of inaccurately estimated body poses in our dataset. Our experiments show that the proposed framework can generate view-consistent, realistic portrait images with complete geometry from all camera angles and accurately predict portrait body pose.

Neural Architecture Search Using Genetic Algorithm for Facial Expression Recognition

Facial expression is one of the most powerful, natural, and universal signals for human beings to express emotional states and intentions. Thus, it is evident the importance of correct and innovative facial expression recognition (FER) approaches in Artificial Intelligence. The current common practice for FER is to correctly design convolutional neural networks' architectures (CNNs) using human expertise. However, finding a well-performing architecture is often a very tedious and error-prone process for deep learning researchers. Neural architecture search (NAS) is an area of growing interest as demonstrated by the large number of scientific works published in recent years thanks to the impressive results achieved in recent years. We propose a genetic algorithm approach that uses an ingenious encoding-decoding mechanism that allows to automatically evolve CNNs on FER tasks attaining high accuracy classification rates. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves the best-known results on the CK+ and FERG datasets as well as competitive results on the JAFFE dataset.

FaceChain: A Playground for Identity-Preserving Portrait Generation

Recent advancement in personalized image generation have unveiled the intriguing capability of pre-trained text-to-image models on learning identity information from a collection of portrait images. However, existing solutions can be vulnerable in producing truthful details, and usually suffer from several defects such as (i) The generated face exhibit its own unique characteristics, \ie facial shape and facial feature positioning may not resemble key characteristics of the input, and (ii) The synthesized face may contain warped, blurred or corrupted regions. In this paper, we present FaceChain, a personalized portrait generation framework that combines a series of customized image-generation model and a rich set of face-related perceptual understanding models (\eg, face detection, deep face embedding extraction, and facial attribute recognition), to tackle aforementioned challenges and to generate truthful personalized portraits, with only a handful of portrait images as input. Concretely, we inject several SOTA face models into the generation procedure, achieving a more efficient label-tagging, data-processing, and model post-processing compared to previous solutions, such as DreamBooth ~\cite{ruiz2023dreambooth} , InstantBooth ~\cite{shi2023instantbooth} , or other LoRA-only approaches ~\cite{hu2021lora} . Through the development of FaceChain, we have identified several potential directions to accelerate development of Face/Human-Centric AIGC research and application. We have designed FaceChain as a framework comprised of pluggable components that can be easily adjusted to accommodate different styles and personalized needs. We hope it can grow to serve the burgeoning needs from the communities. FaceChain is open-sourced under Apache-2.0 license at \url{https://github.com/modelscope/facechain}.

Deep Ensemble Learning with Frame Skipping for Face Anti-Spoofing

Face presentation attacks (PA), also known as spoofing attacks, pose a substantial threat to biometric systems that rely on facial recognition systems, such as access control systems, mobile payments, and identity verification systems. To mitigate the spoofing risk, several video-based methods have been presented in the literature that analyze facial motion in successive video frames. However, estimating the motion between adjacent frames is a challenging task and requires high computational cost. In this paper, we rephrase the face anti-spoofing task as a motion prediction problem and introduce a deep ensemble learning model with a frame skipping mechanism. In particular, the proposed frame skipping adopts a uniform sampling approach by dividing the original video into video clips of fixed size. By doing so, every nth frame of the clip is selected to ensure that the temporal patterns can easily be perceived during the training of three different recurrent neural networks (RNNs). Motivated by the performance of individual RNNs, a meta-model is developed to improve the overall detection performance by combining the prediction of individual RNNs. Extensive experiments were performed on four datasets, and state-of-the-art performance is reported on MSU-MFSD (3.12%), Replay-Attack (11.19%), and OULU-NPU (12.23%) databases by using half total error rates (HTERs) in the most challenging cross-dataset testing scenario.