Unconstrained Facial Action Unit Detection via Latent Feature Domain
China University of Mining and Technology（中国矿业大学）；Engineering Research Center of Mine Digitization, Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China（中华人民共和国教育部矿山数字化工程研究中心）；Monash University（莫纳什大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Deakin University（迪肯大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；East China Normal University（华东师范大学）
Zhiwen Shao, Jianfei Cai, Tat-Jen Cham, Xuequan Lu, Lizhuang Ma
备注：
This paper has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing
Facial action unit (AU) detection in the wild is a challenging problem, due to the unconstrained variability in facial appearances and the lack of accurate annotations. Most existing methods depend on either impractical labor-intensive labeling or inaccurate pseudo labels. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end unconstrained facial AU detection framework based on domain adaptation, which transfers accurate AU labels from a constrained source domain to an unconstrained target domain by exploiting labels of AU-related facial landmarks. Specifically, we map a source image with label and a target image without label into a latent feature domain by combining source landmark-related feature with target landmark-free feature. Due to the combination of source AU-related information and target AU-free information, the latent feature domain with transferred source label can be learned by maximizing the target-domain AU detection performance. Moreover, we introduce a novel landmark adversarial loss to disentangle the landmark-free feature from the landmark-related feature by treating the adversarial learning as a multi-player minimax game. Our framework can also be naturally extended for use with target-domain pseudo AU labels. Extensive experiments show that our method soundly outperforms lower-bounds and upper-bounds of the basic model, as well as state-of-the-art approaches on the challenging in-the-wild benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/ZhiwenShao/ADLD.
In this paper, we present a large-scale, multi-source, and unconstrained database called SDFE-LV for spotting the onset and offset frames of a complete dynamic facial expression from long videos, which is known as the topic of dynamic facial expression spotting (DFES) and a vital prior step for lots of facial expression analysis tasks. Specifically, SDFE-LV consists of 1,191 long videos, each of which contains one or more complete dynamic facial expressions. Moreover, each complete dynamic facial expression in its corresponding long video was independently labeled for five times by 10 well-tra…
Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）；The University of Texas at Arlington（德克萨斯大学阿灵顿分校）
Tracking Facial Points in unconstrained videos is challenging due to the non-rigid deformation that changes over time. In this paper, we propose to exploit incremental learning for person-specific alignment in wild conditions. Our approach takes advantage of part-based representation and cascade regression for robust and efficient alignment on each frame. Unlike existing methods that usually rely on models trained offline, we incrementally update the representation subspace and the cascade of regressors in a unified framework to achieve personalized modeling on the fly. To alleviate the drifti…
ABV-Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management Gwalior（ABV-瓜廖尔印度信息技术与管理学院）；Netaji Subhas University of Technology（内塔吉·苏巴斯理工大学）
This paper addresses the challenges of face attribute detection specifically in the Indian context. While there are numerous face datasets in unconstrained environments, none of them captures emotions in different face orientations. Moreover, there is an under-representation of people of Indian ethnicity in these datasets since they have been scraped from popular search engines. As a result, the performance of state-of-the-art techniques can't be evaluated on Indian faces. In this work, we introduce a new dataset, IIITM Face, for the scientific community to address these challenges. Our datase…
South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Sun Yat-Sen University（中山大学）
Face sketch generation has attracted much attention in the field of visual computing. However, existing methods either are limited to constrained conditions or heavily rely on various preprocessing steps to deal with in-the-wild cases. In this paper, we argue that accurately perceiving facial region and facial components is crucial for unconstrained sketch synthesis. To this end, we propose a novel Perception-Adaptive Network (PANet), which can generate high-quality face sketches under unconstrained conditions in an end-to-end scheme. Specifically, our PANet is composed of i) a Fully Convoluti…
University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
Facial action units (FAUs) are critical for fine-grained facial expression analysis. Although FAU detection has been actively studied using ideally high quality images, it was not thoroughly studied under heavily occluded conditions. In this paper, we propose the first occlusion-robust FAU recognition method to maintain FAU detection performance under heavy occlusions. Our novel approach takes advantage of rich information from the latent space of masked autoencoder (MAE) and transforms it into FAU features. Bypassing the occlusion reconstruction step, our model efficiently extracts FAU featur…
Reweighting Framewise Attention in Video Transformers for Facial Expression Understanding
Inria, Université Côte d’Azur, France（法国国家信息与自动化研究所、法国滨海阿尔卑斯大学）；Hanyang University, South Korea（韩国家阳大学）；Pusan National University, South Korea（韩国釜山国立大学）
Human face exhibits an inherent hierarchy in its representations (i.e., holistic facial expressions can be encoded via a set of facial action units (AUs) and their intensity). Variational (deep) auto-encoders (VAE) have shown great results in unsupervised extraction of hierarchical latent representations from large amounts of image data, while being robust to noise and other undesired artifacts. Potentially, this makes VAEs a suitable approach for learning facial features for AU intensity estimation. Yet, most existing VAE-based methods apply classifiers learned separately from the encoded fea…
Dense facial landmark detection is one of the key elements of face processing pipeline. It is used in virtual face reenactment, emotion recognition, driver status tracking, etc. Early approaches were suitable for facial landmark detection in controlled environments only, which is clearly insufficient. Neural networks have shown an astonishing qualitative improvement for in-the-wild face landmark detection problem, and are now being studied by many researchers in the field. Numerous bright ideas are proposed, often complimentary to each other. However, exploration of the whole volume of novel a…
Semantic face editing of real world facial images is an important application of generative models. Recently, multiple works have explored possible techniques to generate such modifications using the latent structure of pre-trained GAN models. However, such approaches often require training an encoder network and that is typically a time-consuming and resource intensive process. A possible alternative to such a GAN-based architecture can be styleALAE, a latent-space based autoencoder that can generate photo-realistic images of high quality. Unfortunately, the reconstructed image in styleALAE d…
University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Adobe Research（奥多比研究院）
Many people search for foreground objects to use when editing images. While existing methods can retrieve candidates to aid in this, they are constrained to returning objects that belong to a pre-specified semantic class. We instead propose a novel problem of unconstrained foreground object (UFO) search and introduce a solution that supports efficient search by encoding the background image in the same latent space as the candidate foreground objects. A key contribution of our work is a cost-free, scalable approach for creating a large-scale training dataset with a variety of foreground object…
Facial expression transfer and reenactment has been an important research problem given its applications in face editing, image manipulation, and fabricated videos generation. We present a novel method for image-based facial expression transfer, leveraging the recent style-based GAN shown to be very effective for creating realistic looking images. Given two face images, our method can create plausible results that combine the appearance of one image and the expression of the other. To achieve this, we first propose an optimization procedure based on StyleGAN to infer hierarchical style vector …
Ocean University of China（中国海洋大学）；University of Portsmouth（朴茨茅斯大学）；Shandong University of Science & Technology（山东科技大学）
With the increasing demands of applications in virtual reality such as 3D films, virtual Human-Machine Interactions and virtual agents, the analysis of 3D human face analysis is considered to be more and more important as a fundamental step for those virtual reality tasks. Due to information provided by an additional dimension, 3D facial reconstruction enables aforementioned tasks to be achieved with higher accuracy than those based on 2D facial analysis. The denser the 3D facial model is, the more information it could provide. However, most existing dense 3D facial reconstruction methods requ…
This paper investigates how to rapidly and accurately localize facial landmarks in unconstrained, cluttered environments rather than in the well segmented face images. We present a novel Backbone-Branches Fully-Convolutional Neural Network (BB-FCN), which produces facial landmark response maps directly from raw images without relying on pre-process or sliding window approaches. BB-FCN contains one backbone and a number of network branches with each corresponding to one landmark type, and it operates in a progressive manner. Specifically, the backbone roughly detects the locations of facial lan…
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Pinscreen；Adobe Research（Adobe 研究院）；USC Institute for Creative Technologies（南加州大学创新技术研究院）
We present a minimalistic but effective neural network that computes dense facial correspondences in highly unconstrained RGB images. Our network learns a per-pixel flow and a matchability mask between 2D input photographs of a person and the projection of a textured 3D face model. To train such a network, we generate a massive dataset of synthetic faces with dense labels using renderings of a morphable face model with variations in pose, expressions, lighting, and occlusions. We found that a training refinement using real photographs is required to drastically improve the ability to handle re…
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）
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 landm…
Robust face detection is one of the most important pre-processing steps to support facial expression analysis, facial landmarking, face recognition, pose estimation, building of 3D facial models, etc. Although this topic has been intensely studied for decades, it is still challenging due to numerous variants of face images in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we present a novel approach named Multiple Scale Faster Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (MS-FRCNN) to robustly detect human facial regions from images collected under various challenging conditions, e.g. large occlusions, ext…
Orientation-conditioned Facial Texture Mapping for Video-based Facial Remote Photoplethysmography Estimation
Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Data61, Commonwealth and Scientific Industrial Research Organization（联邦科学与工业研究组织Data61）；University of Turku（图尔库大学）
In this paper R-Theta Local Neighborhood Pattern (RTLNP) is proposed for facial image retrieval. RTLNP exploits relationships amongst the pixels in local neighborhood of the reference pixel at different angular and radial widths. The proposed encoding scheme divides the local neighborhood into sectors of equal angular width. These sectors are again divided into subsectors of two radial widths. Average grayscales values of these two subsectors are encoded to generate the micropatterns. Performance of the proposed descriptor has been evaluated and results are compared with the state of the art d…
Robust face detection in the wild is one of the ultimate components to support various facial related problems, i.e. unconstrained face recognition, facial periocular recognition, facial landmarking and pose estimation, facial expression recognition, 3D facial model construction, etc. Although the face detection problem has been intensely studied for decades with various commercial applications, it still meets problems in some real-world scenarios due to numerous challenges, e.g. heavy facial occlusions, extremely low resolutions, strong illumination, exceptionally pose variations, image or vi…
Facial alignment involves finding a set of landmark points on an image with a known semantic meaning. However, this semantic meaning of landmark points is often lost in 2D approaches where landmarks are either moved to visible boundaries or ignored as the pose of the face changes. In order to extract consistent alignment points across large poses, the 3D structure of the face must be considered in the alignment step. However, extracting a 3D structure from a single 2D image usually requires alignment in the first place. We present our novel approach to simultaneously extract the 3D shape of th…
Generating and manipulating human facial images using high-level attributal controls are important and interesting problems. The models proposed in previous work can solve one of these two problems (generation or manipulation), but not both coherently. This paper proposes a novel model that learns how to both generate and modify the facial image from high-level semantic attributes. Our key idea is to formulate a Semi-Latent Facial Attribute Space (SL-FAS) to systematically learn relationship between user-defined and latent attributes, as well as between those attributes and RGB imagery. As par…
Segmentation of thermal facial images is a challenging task. This is because facial features often lack salience due to high-dynamic thermal range scenes and occlusion issues. Limited availability of datasets from unconstrained settings further limits the use of the state-of-the-art segmentation networks, loss functions and learning strategies which have been built and validated for RGB images. To address the challenge, we propose Self-Adversarial Multi-scale Contrastive Learning (SAM-CL) framework as a new training strategy for thermal image segmentation. SAM-CL framework consists of a SAM-CL…
Nanjing University（南京大学）；JD AI Research（京东人工智能研究院）
Due to the subjective annotation and the inherent interclass similarity of facial expressions, one of key challenges in Facial Expression Recognition (FER) is the annotation ambiguity. In this paper, we proposes a solution, named DMUE, to address the problem of annotation ambiguity from two perspectives: the latent Distribution Mining and the pairwise Uncertainty Estimation. For the former, an auxiliary multi-branch learning framework is introduced to better mine and describe the latent distribution in the label space. For the latter, the pairwise relationship of semantic feature between insta…
Indian Institute of Information Technology, Lucknow（印度信息技术学院，勒克瑙）；Indian Institute of Information Technology, Allahabad（印度信息技术学院，安拉阿巴德）
Feature description is one of the most frequently studied areas in the expert systems and machine learning. Effective encoding of the images is an essential requirement for accurate matching. These encoding schemes play a significant role in recognition and retrieval systems. Facial recognition systems should be effective enough to accurately recognize individuals under intrinsic and extrinsic variations of the system. The templates or descriptors used in these systems encode spatial relationships of the pixels in the local neighbourhood of an image. Features encoded using these hand crafted d…
University of California San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur（印度理工学院坎普尔分校）；MPI for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）；Emotient（Emotient公司）
We study the problem of facial analysis in videos. We propose a novel weakly supervised learning method that models the video event (expression, pain etc.) as a sequence of automatically mined, discriminative sub-events (eg. onset and offset phase for smile, brow lower and cheek raise for pain). The proposed model is inspired by the recent works on Multiple Instance Learning and latent SVM/HCRF- it extends such frameworks to model the ordinal or temporal aspect in the videos, approximately. We obtain consistent improvements over relevant competitive baselines on four challenging and publicly a…
EmoDiffusion: Enhancing Emotional 3D Facial Animation with Latent Diffusion Models
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；University of Science and Technology Beijing（北京科技大学）；The New Laboratory of Pattern Recognition (NLPR), State Key Laboratory of Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所多模态人工智能系统国家重点实验室模式识别新实验室）；The New Laboratory of Pattern Recognition (NLPR)（模式识别新实验室）
Face recognition system is one of the esteemed research areas in pattern recognition and computer vision as long as its major challenges. A few challenges in recognizing faces are blur, illumination, and varied expressions. Blur is natural while taking photographs using cameras, mobile phones, etc. Blur can be uniform and non-uniform. Usually non-uniform blur happens in images taken using handheld image devices. Distinguishing or handling a blurred image in a face recognition system is generally tough. Under varying lighting conditions, it is challenging to identify the person correctly. Diver…
LRA-GNN: Latent Relation-Aware Graph Neural Network with Initial and Dynamic Residual for Facial Age Estimation
College of Computer and Mathematics, Central South University of Forestry and Technology（中南林业科技大学计算机与数学学院）；Department of Computer Science, State University of New York（纽约州立大学计算机科学系）
We propose a generative framework based on generative adversarial network (GAN) to enhance facial attractiveness while preserving facial identity and high-fidelity. Given a portrait image as input, having applied gradient descent to recover a latent vector that this generative framework can use to synthesize an image resemble to the input image, beauty semantic editing manipulation on the corresponding recovered latent vector based on InterFaceGAN enables this framework to achieve facial image beautification. This paper compared our system with Beholder-GAN and our proposed result-enhanced ver…
Nokia Bell-Labs（诺基亚贝尔实验室）；Escuela Politecnica Superior, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid（马德里自治大学高等理工学院）
The role of soft biometrics to enhance person recognition systems in unconstrained scenarios has not been extensively studied. Here, we explore the utility of the following modalities: gender, ethnicity, age, glasses, beard, and moustache. We consider two assumptions: 1) manual estimation of soft biometrics and 2) automatic estimation from two commercial off-the-shelf systems (COTS). All experiments are reported using the labeled faces in the wild (LFW) database. First, we study the discrimination capabilities of soft biometrics standalone. Then, experiments are carried out fusing soft biometr…
While recent research has progressively overcome the low-resolution constraint of one-shot face video re-enactment with the help of StyleGAN's high-fidelity portrait generation, these approaches rely on at least one of the following: explicit 2D/3D priors, optical flow based warping as motion descriptors, off-the-shelf encoders, etc., which constrain their performance (e.g., inconsistent predictions, inability to capture fine facial details and accessories, poor generalization, artifacts). We propose an end-to-end framework for simultaneously supporting face attribute edits, facial motions and…
Télécom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris（巴黎高等电信学院，巴黎综合理工学院）；InterDigital R&I（InterDigital研究与创新部门）
High quality facial image editing is a challenging problem in the movie post-production industry, requiring a high degree of control and identity preservation. Previous works that attempt to tackle this problem may suffer from the entanglement of facial attributes and the loss of the person's identity. Furthermore, many algorithms are limited to a certain task. To tackle these limitations, we propose to edit facial attributes via the latent space of a StyleGAN generator, by training a dedicated latent transformation network and incorporating explicit disentanglement and identity preservation t…
We propose a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) for face detection leveraging on facial attributes based supervision. We observe a phenomenon that part detectors emerge within CNN trained to classify attributes from uncropped face images, without any explicit part supervision. The observation motivates a new method for finding faces through scoring facial parts responses by their spatial structure and arrangement. The scoring mechanism is data-driven, and carefully formulated considering challenging cases where faces are only partially visible. This consideration allows our network to det…
In this paper, we present an unsupervised learning approach for analyzing facial behavior based on a deep generative model combined with a convolutional neural network (CNN). We jointly train a variational auto-encoder (VAE) and a generative adversarial network (GAN) to learn a powerful latent representation from footage of audiences viewing feature-length movies. We show that the learned latent representation successfully encodes meaningful signatures of behaviors related to audience engagement (smiling & laughing) and disengagement (yawning). Our results provide a proof of concept for a more…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Google Inc.（谷歌公司）
High-level manipulation of facial expressions in images --- such as changing a smile to a neutral expression --- is challenging because facial expression changes are highly non-linear, and vary depending on the appearance of the face. We present a fully automatic approach to editing faces that combines the advantages of flow-based face manipulation with the more recent generative capabilities of Variational Autoencoders (VAEs). During training, our model learns to encode the flow from one expression to another over a low-dimensional latent space. At test time, expression editing can be done si…
We present an invert-and-edit framework to automatically transform facial weight of an input face image to look thinner or heavier by leveraging semantic facial attributes encoded in the latent space of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Using a pre-trained StyleGAN as the underlying generator, we first employ an optimization-based embedding method to invert the input image into the StyleGAN latent space. Then, we identify the facial-weight attribute direction in the latent space via supervised learning and edit the inverted latent code by moving it positively or negatively along the extr…
We present BioMetricNet: a novel framework for deep unconstrained face verification which learns a regularized metric to compare facial features. Differently from popular methods such as FaceNet, the proposed approach does not impose any specific metric on facial features; instead, it shapes the decision space by learning a latent representation in which matching and non-matching pairs are mapped onto clearly separated and well-behaved target distributions. In particular, the network jointly learns the best feature representation, and the best metric that follows the target distributions, to b…
Most existing AU detection works considering AU relationships are relying on probabilistic graphical models with manually extracted features. This paper proposes an end-to-end deep learning framework for facial AU detection with graph convolutional network (GCN) for AU relation modeling, which has not been explored before. In particular, AU related regions are extracted firstly, latent representations full of AU information are learned through an auto-encoder. Moreover, each latent representation vector is feed into GCN as a node, the connection mode of GCN is determined based on the relations…
LatRef-Diff: Latent and Reference-Guided Diffusion for Facial Attribute Editing and Style Manipulation
GuangDong Province Key Lab of Information Security Technology and School of Computer Science and Engineering（广东信息安全技术重点实验室和计算机科学与工程学院）；School of Cyber Science and Technology, Shenzhen Campus（深圳校区网络科学与技术学院）；Guangdong Laboratory of Machine Perception and Intelligent Computing, Faculty of Engineering（广东机器感知与智能计算实验室，工程学院）
Ritchie School of Engineering and Computer Science, University of Denver（丹佛大学里奇工程与计算机科学学院）；Department of Psychology, University of Tennessee（田纳西大学心理学系）；College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Denver（丹佛大学艺术、人文与社会科学学院）
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are capable of synthesizing high-quality facial images. Despite their success, GANs do not provide any information about the relationship between the input vectors and the generated images. Currently, facial GANs are trained on imbalanced datasets, which generate less diverse images. For example, more than 77% of 100K images that we randomly synthesized using the StyleGAN3 are classified as Happy, and only around 3% are Angry. The problem even becomes worse when a mixture of facial attributes is desired: less than 1% of the generated samples are Angry Wom…
SPEAK: Speech-Driven Pose and Emotion-Adjustable Talking Head Generation
Ping An Technology（平安科技）；Southeast University（东南大学）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；East China University of Science and Technology（华东理工大学）；University of Shanghai for Science and Technology（上海理工大学）
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, CAS（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）
In this paper, we propose a novel deep convolutional network (DCN) that achieves outstanding performance on FDDB, PASCAL Face, and AFW. Specifically, our method achieves a high recall rate of 90.99% on the challenging FDDB benchmark, outperforming the state-of-the-art method by a large margin of 2.91%. Importantly, we consider finding faces from a new perspective through scoring facial parts responses by their spatial structure and arrangement. The scoring mechanism is carefully formulated considering challenging cases where faces are only partially visible. This consideration allows our netwo…
University of Zagreb（萨格勒布大学）；Linköping University（林雪平大学）
Localization of salient facial landmark points, such as eye corners or the tip of the nose, is still considered a challenging computer vision problem despite recent efforts. This is especially evident in unconstrained environments, i.e., in the presence of background clutter and large head pose variations. Most methods that achieve state-of-the-art accuracy are slow, and, thus, have limited applications. We describe a method that can accurately estimate the positions of relevant facial landmarks in real-time even on hardware with limited processing power, such as mobile devices. This is achiev…
