Considerable effort has been devoted to the automatic extraction of information about action of the face from image sequences. Within the context of human-computer interaction (HCI) we may distinguish systems that allow expression from those which aim at recognition. Most of the work in facial action processing has been directed at automatically recognizing affect from facial actions. By contrast, facial gesture interfaces, which respond to deliberate facial actions, have received comparatively little attention. This paper reviews several projects on vision-based interfaces that rely on facial action for intentional HCI. Applications to several domains are introduced, including text entry, artistic and musical expression and assistive technology for motor-impaired users.
Can advanced deep learning technologies be applied to analyze some ancient humanistic arts? Can deep learning technologies be directly applied to special scenes such as facial expression analysis of Terracotta Warriors? The big challenging is that the facial features of the Terracotta Warriors are very different from today's people. We found that it is very poor to directly use the models that have been trained on other classic facial expression datasets to analyze the facial expressions of the Terracotta Warriors. At the same time, the lack of public high-quality facial expression data of the Terracotta Warriors also limits the use of deep learning technologies. Therefore, we firstly use Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to generate enough high-quality facial expression data for subsequent training and recognition. We also verify the effectiveness of this approach. For the first time, this paper uses deep learning technologies to find common facial expressions of general and postured Terracotta Warriors. These results will provide an updated technical means for the research of art of the Terracotta Warriors and shine lights on the research of other ancient arts.
Face detection and recognition has been prevalent with research scholars and diverse approaches have been incorporated till date to serve purpose. The rampant advent of biometric analysis systems, which may be full body scanners, or iris detection and recognition systems and the finger print recognition systems, and surveillance systems deployed for safety and security purposes have contributed to inclination towards same. Advances has been made with frontal view, lateral view of the face or using facial expressions such as anger, happiness and gloominess, still images and video image to be used for detection and recognition. This led to newer methods for face detection and recognition to be introduced in achieving accurate results and economically feasible and extremely secure. Techniques such as Principal Component analysis (PCA), Independent component analysis (ICA), Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), have been the predominant ones to be used. But with improvements needed in the previous approaches Neural Networks based recognition was like boon to the industry. It not only enhanced the recognition but also the efficiency of the process. Choosing Backpropagation as the learning method was clearly out of its efficiency to recognize nonlinear faces with an acceptance ratio of more than 90% and execution time of only few seconds.
Facial analysis has attracted much attention in the technology for human-machine interface. Different methods of classification based on sparse representation and Gabor kernels have been widely applied in the fields of facial analysis. However, most of these methods treat face from a whole view standpoint. In terms of the importance of different facial views, in this paper, we present multi-view face analysis based on sparse representation and Gabor wavelet coefficients. To evaluate the performance, we conduct face analysis experiments including face recognition (FR) and face expression recognition (FER) on JAFFE database. Experiments are conducted from two parts: (1) Face images are divided into three facial parts which are forehead, eye and mouth. (2) Face images are divided into 8 parts by the orientation of Gabor kernels. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed methods can significantly boost the performance and perform better than the other methods.
Systems that analyse faces have seen significant improvements in recent years and are today used in numerous application scenarios. However, these systems have been found to be negatively affected by facial alterations such as tattoos. To better understand and mitigate the effect of facial tattoos in facial analysis systems, large datasets of images of individuals with and without tattoos are needed. To this end, we propose a generator for automatically adding realistic tattoos to facial images. Moreover, we demonstrate the feasibility of the generation by training a deep learning-based model for removing tattoos from face images. The experimental results show that it is possible to remove facial tattoos from real images without degrading the quality of the image. Additionally, we show that it is possible to improve face recognition accuracy by using the proposed deep learning-based tattoo removal before extracting and comparing facial features.
Facial landmark localization plays a critical role in face recognition and analysis. In this paper, we propose a novel cascaded backbone-branches fully convolutional neural network~(BB-FCN) for rapidly and accurately localizing facial landmarks in unconstrained and cluttered settings. Our proposed BB-FCN generates facial landmark response maps directly from raw images without any preprocessing. BB-FCN follows a coarse-to-fine cascaded pipeline, which consists of a backbone network for roughly detecting the locations of all facial landmarks and one branch network for each type of detected landmark for further refining their locations. Furthermore, to facilitate the facial landmark localization under unconstrained settings, we propose a large-scale benchmark named SYSU16K, which contains 16000 faces with large variations in pose, expression, illumination and resolution. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that our proposed BB-FCN can significantly outperform the state-of-the-art under both constrained (i.e., within detected facial regions only) and unconstrained settings. We further confirm that high-quality facial landmarks localized with our proposed network can also improve the precision and recall of face detection.
Artificial neural networks have already shown their success in face recognition and similar complex pattern recognition tasks. However, a major disadvantage of the technique is that it is extremely slow during training for larger classes and hence not suitable for real-time complex problems such as pattern recognition. This is an attempt to develop a parallel framework for the training algorithm of a perceptron. In this paper, two general architectures for a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) have been demonstrated. The first architecture is All-Class-in-One-Network (ACON) where all the classes are placed in a single network and the second one is One-Class-in-One-Network (OCON) where an individual single network is responsible for each and every class. Capabilities of these two architectures were compared and verified in solving human face recognition, which is a complex pattern recognition task where several factors affect the recognition performance like pose variations, facial expression changes, occlusions, and most importantly illumination changes. Both the structures were implemented and tested for face recognition purpose and experimental results show that the OCON structure performs better than the generally used ACON ones in term of training convergence speed of the network. Unlike the conventional sequential approach of training the neural networks, the OCON technique may be implemented by training all the classes of the face images simultaneously.
Classification of human emotions remains an important and challenging task for many computer vision algorithms, especially in the era of humanoid robots which coexist with humans in their everyday life. Currently proposed methods for emotion recognition solve this task using multi-layered convolutional networks that do not explicitly infer any facial features in the classification phase. In this work, we postulate a fundamentally different approach to solve emotion recognition task that relies on incorporating facial landmarks as a part of the classification loss function. To that end, we extend a recently proposed Deep Alignment Network (DAN) with a term related to facial features. Thanks to this simple modification, our model called EmotionalDAN is able to outperform state-of-the-art emotion classification methods on two challenging benchmark dataset by up to 5%. Furthermore, we visualize image regions analyzed by the network when making a decision and the results indicate that our EmotionalDAN model is able to correctly identify facial landmarks responsible for expressing the emotions.
This paper presents a classifier ensemble for Facial Expression Recognition (FER) based on models derived from transfer learning. The main experimentation work is conducted for facial action unit detection using feature extraction and fine-tuning convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Several classifiers for extracted CNN codes such as Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), Support Vector Machines (SVMs) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) are compared and evaluated. Multi-model ensembles are also used to further improve the performance. We have found that VGG-Face and ResNet are the relatively optimal pre-trained models for action unit recognition using feature extraction and the ensemble of VGG-Net variants and ResNet achieves the best result.
Facial analysis is an active research area in computer vision, with many practical applications. Most of the existing studies focus on addressing one specific task and maximizing its performance. For a complete facial analysis system, one needs to solve these tasks efficiently to ensure a smooth experience. In this work, we present a system-level design of a real-time facial analysis system. With a collection of deep neural networks for object detection, classification, and regression, the system recognizes age, gender, facial expression, and facial similarity for each person that appears in the camera view. We investigate the parallelization and interplay of individual tasks. Results on common off-the-shelf architecture show that the system's accuracy is comparable to the state-of-the-art methods, and the recognition speed satisfies real-time requirements. Moreover, we propose a multitask network for jointly predicting the first three attributes, i.e., age, gender, and facial expression. Source code and trained models are available at https://github.com/mahehu/TUT-live-age-estimator.