Blur in facial images significantly impedes the efficiency of recognition approaches. However, most existing blind deconvolution methods cannot generate satisfactory results due to their dependence on strong edges, which are sufficient in natural images but not in facial images. In this paper, we represent point spread functions (PSFs) by the linear combination of a set of pre-defined orthogonal PSFs, and similarly, an estimated intrinsic (EI) sharp face image is represented by the linear combination of a set of pre-defined orthogonal face images. In doing so, PSF and EI estimation is simplified to discovering two sets of linear combination coefficients, which are simultaneously found by our proposed coupled learning algorithm. To make our method robust to different types of blurry face images, we generate several candidate PSFs and EIs for a test image, and then, a non-blind deconvolution method is adopted to generate more EIs by those candidate PSFs. Finally, we deploy a blind image quality assessment metric to automatically select the optimal EI. Thorough experiments on the facial recognition technology database, extended Yale face database B, CMU pose, illumination, and expression (PIE) database, and face recognition grand challenge database version 2.0 demonstrate that the proposed approach effectively restores intrinsic sharp face images and, consequently, improves the performance of face recognition.
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
When a facial image is blurred, it significantly affects high-level vision tasks such as face recognition. The purpose of facial image deblurring is to recover a clear image from a blurry input image, which can improve the recognition accuracy, etc. However, general deblurring methods do not perform well on facial images. Therefore, some face deblurring methods have been proposed to improve performance by adding semantic or structural information as specific priors according to the characteristics of the facial images. In this paper, we survey and summarize recently published methods for facia…
We introduce a novel framework for continuous facial motion deblurring that restores the continuous sharp moment latent in a single motion-blurred face image via a moment control factor. Although a motion-blurred image is the accumulated signal of continuous sharp moments during the exposure time, most existing single image deblurring approaches aim to restore a fixed number of frames using multiple networks and training stages. To address this problem, we propose a continuous facial motion deblurring network based on GAN (CFMD-GAN), which is a novel framework for restoring the continuous mome…
Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence（英ception人工智能研究所）；Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Nvidia（英伟达）；University of California at Merced（加州大学默塞德分校）
In this paper, we propose an effective and efficient face deblurring algorithm by exploiting semantic cues via deep convolutional neural networks. As the human faces are highly structured and share unified facial components (e.g., eyes and mouths), such semantic information provides a strong prior for restoration. We incorporate face semantic labels as input priors and propose an adaptive structural loss to regularize facial local structures within an end-to-end deep convolutional neural network. Specifically, we first use a coarse deblurring network to reduce the motion blur on the input face…
Sensetime Research（商汤科技研究院）；Tencent（腾讯）；South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；University of California at Merced（加州大学默塞德分校）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）；Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）
We address the problem of restoring a high-resolution face image from a blurry low-resolution input. This problem is difficult as super-resolution and deblurring need to be tackled simultaneously. Moreover, existing algorithms cannot handle face images well as low-resolution face images do not have much texture which is especially critical for deblurring. In this paper, we propose an effective algorithm by utilizing the domain-specific knowledge of human faces to recover high-quality faces. We first propose a facial component guided deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to restore a coarse f…
Whiting School of Engineering, Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学怀廷工程学院）；Adobe Inc.（奥多比公司）
We propose a novel multi-stream architecture and training methodology that exploits semantic labels for facial image deblurring. The proposed Uncertainty Guided Multi- Stream Semantic Network (UMSN) processes regions belonging to each semantic class independently and learns to combine their outputs into the final deblurred result. Pixel-wise semantic labels are obtained using a segmentation network. A predicted confidence measure is used during training to guide the network towards the challenging regions of the human face such as the eyes and nose. The entire network is trained in an end- to-…
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）；Hikvision Research America（海康威视美国研究院）；University of California, Merced（加州大学默塞德分校）
Human faces are one interesting object class with numerous applications. While significant progress has been made in the generic deblurring problem, existing methods are less effective for blurry face images. The success of the state-of-the-art image deblurring algorithms stems mainly from implicit or explicit restoration of salient edges for kernel estimation. However, existing methods are less effective as only few edges can be restored from blurry face images for kernel estimation. In this paper, we address the problem of deblurring face images by exploiting facial structures. We propose a …
Facial image super-resolution (SR) is an important preprocessing for facial image analysis, face recognition, and image-based 3D face reconstruction. Recent convolutional neural network (CNN) based method has shown excellent performance by learning mapping relation using pairs of low-resolution (LR) and high-resolution (HR) facial images. However, since the HR facial image reconstruction using CNN is conventionally aimed to increase the PSNR and SSIM metrics, the reconstructed HR image might not be realistic even with high scores. An adversarial framework is proposed in this study to reconstru…
In recent work (Soltani, Kilmer, Hansen, BIT 2016), an algorithm for non-negative tensor patch dictionary learning in the context of X-ray CT imaging and based on a tensor-tensor product called the $t$-product (Kilmer and Martin, 2011) was presented. Building on that work, in this paper, we use of non-negative tensor patch-based dictionaries trained on other data, such as facial image data, for the purposes of either compression or image deblurring. We begin with an analysis in which we address issues such as suitability of the tensor-based approach relative to a matrix-based approach, diction…
School of Informatics（信息学院）；Xiamen University（厦门大学）
Low-quality face image restoration is a popular research direction in today's computer vision field. It can be used as a pre-work for tasks such as face detection and face recognition. At present, there is a lot of work to solve the problem of low-quality faces under various environmental conditions. This paper mainly focuses on the restoration of motion-blurred faces. In increasingly abundant mobile scenes, the fast recovery of motion-blurred faces can bring highly effective speed improvements in tasks such as face matching. In order to achieve this goal, a deblurring method for motion-blurre…
Chengdu University of Information Technology（成都信息工程大学）；Sichuan University（四川大学）
Face deblurring aims to restore a clear face image from a blurred input image with more explicit structure and facial details. However, most conventional image and face deblurring methods focus on the whole generated image resolution without consideration of special face part texture and generally produce unsufficient details. Considering that faces and backgrounds have different distribution information, in this study, we designed an effective face deblurring network based on separable normalization and adaptive denormalization (SNADNet). First, We fine-tuned the face parsing network to obtai…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology (BNRist)（北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心（BNRist））；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；Amazon Rekognition（亚马逊Rekognition）
Recently, facial landmark detection algorithms have achieved remarkable performance on static images. However, these algorithms are neither accurate nor stable in motion-blurred videos. The missing of structure information makes it difficult for state-of-the-art facial landmark detection algorithms to yield good results. In this paper, we propose a framework named FAB that takes advantage of structure consistency in the temporal dimension for facial landmark detection in motion-blurred videos. A structure predictor is proposed to predict the missing face structural information temporally, whic…
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；University of Bern（伯尔尼大学）
Face analysis is a core part of computer vision, in which remarkable progress has been observed in the past decades. Current methods achieve recognition and tracking with invariance to fundamental modes of variation such as illumination, 3D pose, expressions. Notwithstanding, a much less standing mode of variation is motion deblurring, which however presents substantial challenges in face analysis. Recent approaches either make oversimplifying assumptions, e.g. in cases of joint optimization with other tasks, or fail to preserve the highly structured shape/identity information. Therefore, we p…
Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；University of California, Merced（加利福尼亚大学默塞德分校）；Nvidia（英伟达）；Google Cloud（谷歌云）
In this paper, we present an effective and efficient face deblurring algorithm by exploiting semantic cues via deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). As face images are highly structured and share several key semantic components (e.g., eyes and mouths), the semantic information of a face provides a strong prior for restoration. As such, we propose to incorporate global semantic priors as input and impose local structure losses to regularize the output within a multi-scale deep CNN. We train the network with perceptual and adversarial losses to generate photo-realistic results and develop a…
URWKV: Unified RWKV Model with Multi-state Perspective for Low-light Image Restoration
Fujian Key Laboratory of Network Computing and Intelligent Information Processing, College of Computer and Data Science, Fuzhou University（福建网络计算与智能信息处理重点实验室，计算机与数据科学学院，福州大学）；Engineering Research Center of Big Data Intelligence, Ministry of Education（大数据智能工程研究中心，教育部）
Blind deblurring consists a long studied task, however the outcomes of generic methods are not effective in real world blurred images. Domain-specific methods for deblurring targeted object categories, e.g. text or faces, frequently outperform their generic counterparts, hence they are attracting an increasing amount of attention. In this work, we develop such a domain-specific method to tackle deblurring of human faces, henceforth referred to as face deblurring. Studying faces is of tremendous significance in computer vision, however face deblurring has yet to demonstrate some convincing resu…
We propose a very fast and effective one-step restoring method for blurry face images. In the last decades, many blind deblurring algorithms have been proposed to restore latent sharp images. However, these algorithms run slowly because of involving two steps: kernel estimation and following non-blind deconvolution or latent image estimation. Also they cannot handle face images in small size. Our proposed method restores sharp face images directly in one step using Convolutional Neural Network. Unlike previous deep learning involved methods that can only handle a single blur kernel at one time…
Chosun University（朝鲜大学）；Hanoi University of Science and Technology（河内理工大学）；Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology（越南科学技术院）
Pose-invariant face recognition refers to the problem of identifying or verifying a person by analyzing face images captured from different poses. This problem is challenging due to the large variation of pose, illumination and facial expression. A promising approach to deal with pose variation is to fulfill incomplete UV maps extracted from in-the-wild faces, then attach the completed UV map to a fitted 3D mesh and finally generate different 2D faces of arbitrary poses. The synthesized faces increase the pose variation for training deep face recognition models and reduce the pose discrepancy …
University of Bern（伯尔尼大学）；Adobe Research（Adobe 研究院）
We propose a solution to the novel task of rendering sharp videos from new viewpoints from a single motion-blurred image of a face. Our method handles the complexity of face blur by implicitly learning the geometry and motion of faces through the joint training on three large datasets: FFHQ and 300VW, which are publicly available, and a new Bern Multi-View Face Dataset (BMFD) that we built. The first two datasets provide a large variety of faces and allow our model to generalize better. BMFD instead allows us to introduce multi-view constraints, which are crucial to synthesizing sharp videos f…
In this paper, we present a deep coupled framework to address the problem of matching sketch image against a gallery of mugshots. Face sketches have the essential in- formation about the spatial topology and geometric details of faces while missing some important facial attributes such as ethnicity, hair, eye, and skin color. We propose a cou- pled deep neural network architecture which utilizes facial attributes in order to improve the sketch-photo recognition performance. The proposed Attribute-Assisted Deep Con- volutional Neural Network (AADCNN) method exploits the facial attributes and le…
Facial landmark localization is a fundamental module for pose-invariant face recognition. The most common approach for facial landmark detection is cascaded regression, which is composed of two steps: feature extraction and facial shape regression. Recent methods employ deep convolutional networks to extract robust features for each step, while the whole system could be regarded as a deep cascaded regression architecture. In this work, instead of employing a deep regression network, a Globally Optimized Dual-Pathway (GoDP) deep architecture is proposed to identify the target pixels through sol…
Many methods have been proposed over the years to tackle the task of facial 3D geometry and texture recovery from a single image. Such methods often fail to provide high-fidelity texture without relying on 3D facial scans during training. In contrast, the complementary task of 3D facial generation has not received as much attention. As opposed to the 2D texture domain, where GANs have proven to produce highly realistic facial images, the more challenging 3D geometry domain has not yet caught up to the same levels of realism and diversity. In this paper, we propose a novel unified pipeline for …
Beckman Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校贝克曼研究所）；Texas A&M University（德克萨斯A&M大学）；University of Missouri, Kansas City（密苏里大学堪萨斯城分校）；Snap Inc（Snap公司）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）
Emotion recognition from facial expressions is tremendously useful, especially when coupled with smart devices and wireless multimedia applications. However, the inadequate network bandwidth often limits the spatial resolution of the transmitted video, which will heavily degrade the recognition reliability. We develop a novel framework to achieve robust emotion recognition from low bit rate video. While video frames are downsampled at the encoder side, the decoder is embedded with a deep network model for joint super-resolution (SR) and recognition. Notably, we propose a novel max-mix training…
In this paper, we present an attribute-guided deep coupled learning framework to address the problem of matching polarimetric thermal face photos against a gallery of visible faces. The coupled framework contains two sub-networks, one dedicated to the visible spectrum and the second sub-network dedicated to the polarimetric thermal spectrum. Each sub-network is made of a generative adversarial network (GAN) architecture. We propose a novel Attribute-Guided Coupled Generative Adversarial Network (AGC-GAN) architecture which utilizes facial attributes to improve the thermal-to-visible face recog…
In this paper, we propose a novel attribute-guided cross-resolution (low-resolution to high-resolution) face recognition framework that leverages a coupled generative adversarial network (GAN) structure with adversarial training to find the hidden relationship between the low-resolution and high-resolution images in a latent common embedding subspace. The coupled GAN framework consists of two sub-networks, one dedicated to the low-resolution domain and the other dedicated to the high-resolution domain. Each sub-network aims to find a projection that maximizes the pair-wise correlation between …
Aerial images are often degraded by space-varying motion blur and simultaneous uneven illumination. To recover high-quality aerial image from its non-uniform version, we propose a novel patch-wise restoration approach based on a key observation that the degree of blurring is inevitably affected by the illuminated conditions. A non-local Retinex model is developed to accurately estimate the reflectance component from the degraded aerial image. Thereafter the uneven illumination is corrected well. And then non-uniform coupled blurring in the enhanced reflectance image is alleviated and transform…
Face sketches are able to capture the spatial topology of a face while lacking some facial attributes such as race, skin, or hair color. Existing sketch-photo recognition approaches have mostly ignored the importance of facial attributes. In this paper, we propose a new loss function, called attribute-centered loss, to train a Deep Coupled Convolutional Neural Network (DCCNN) for the facial attribute guided sketch to photo matching. Specifically, an attribute-centered loss is proposed which learns several distinct centers, in a shared embedding space, for photos and sketches with different com…
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey（罗格斯新泽西州立大学）
Synthesizing face sketches from real photos and its inverse have many applications. However, photo/sketch synthesis remains a challenging problem due to the fact that photo and sketch have different characteristics. In this work, we consider this task as an image-to-image translation problem and explore the recently popular generative models (GANs) to generate high-quality realistic photos from sketches and sketches from photos. Recent GAN-based methods have shown promising results on image-to-image translation problems and photo-to-sketch synthesis in particular, however, they are known to ha…
Safeguarding Facial Identity against Diffusion-based Face Swapping via Cascading Pathway Disruption
MoE Key Laboratory of Information Technology, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China（信息科技教育部重点实验室，中山大学，广州，中国）；State Key Laboratory of Mathematical Engineering and Advanced Computing, Zhengzhou, China（数学工程与先进计算国家重点实验室，郑州，中国）
Generating realistic 3D faces is of high importance for computer graphics and computer vision applications. Generally, research on 3D face generation revolves around linear statistical models of the facial surface. Nevertheless, these models cannot represent faithfully either the facial texture or the normals of the face, which are very crucial for photo-realistic face synthesis. Recently, it was demonstrated that Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) can be used for generating high-quality textures of faces. Nevertheless, the generation process either omits the geometry and normals, or indep…
The task of age transformation illustrates the change of an individual's appearance over time. Accurately modeling this complex transformation over an input facial image is extremely challenging as it requires making convincing, possibly large changes to facial features and head shape, while still preserving the input identity. In this work, we present an image-to-image translation method that learns to directly encode real facial images into the latent space of a pre-trained unconditional GAN (e.g., StyleGAN) subject to a given aging shift. We employ a pre-trained age regression network to ex…
University of Caen（卡昂大学）；MPI for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）；IIT Kanpur（印度理工学院坎普尔分校）
We propose a novel Coupled Projection multi-task Metric Learning (CP-mtML) method for large scale face retrieval. In contrast to previous works which were limited to low dimensional features and small datasets, the proposed method scales to large datasets with high dimensional face descriptors. It utilises pairwise (dis-)similarity constraints as supervision and hence does not require exhaustive class annotation for every training image. While, traditionally, multi-task learning methods have been validated on same dataset but different tasks, we work on the more challenging setting with hetero…
PINNOCHIO: Physics-Informed Neural Network for Coupled Hyperelastic Interface-Volume Simulation in Orthognathic Surgery
Department of Biomedical Engineering and Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute（生物医学工程系和生物技术与跨学科研究中心，伦塞拉尔理工学院）；Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, Houston Methodist Research Institute（口腔颌面外科系，休斯顿方法主义研究学院）；Department of Neurosurgery, Baylor College of Medicine（神经外科系，贝勒医学院）
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）
After intensive research, heterogenous face recognition is still a challenging problem. The main difficulties are owing to the complex relationship between heterogenous face image spaces. The heterogeneity is always tightly coupled with other variations, which makes the relationship of heterogenous face images highly nonlinear. Many excellent methods have been proposed to model the nonlinear relationship, but they apt to overfit to the training set, due to limited samples. Inspired by the unsupervised algorithms in deep learning, this paper proposes an novel framework for heterogeneous face re…
NetEase Fuxi AI Lab（网易伏羲人工智能实验室）；University of Michigan, Ann Arbor（密歇根大学安娜堡分校）
Game character customization is one of the core features of many recent Role-Playing Games (RPGs), where players can edit the appearance of their in-game characters with their preferences. This paper studies the problem of automatically creating in-game characters with a single photo. In recent literature on this topic, neural networks are introduced to make game engine differentiable and the self-supervised learning is used to predict facial customization parameters. However, in previous methods, the expression parameters and facial identity parameters are highly coupled with each other, maki…
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Michigan State University（密歇根州立大学）
The two underlying requirements of face age progression, i.e. aging accuracy and identity permanence, are not well studied in the literature. This paper presents a novel generative adversarial network based approach to address the issues in a coupled manner. It separately models the constraints for the intrinsic subject-specific characteristics and the age-specific facial changes with respect to the elapsed time, ensuring that the generated faces present desired aging effects while simultaneously keeping personalized properties stable. To ensure photo-realistic facial details, high-level age-s…
Technion – Israel Institute of Technology（以色列理工学院）
Artificial data synthesis is currently a well studied topic with useful applications in data science, computer vision, graphics and many other fields. Generating realistic data is especially challenging since human perception is highly sensitive to non realistic appearance. In recent times, new levels of realism have been achieved by advances in GAN training procedures and architectures. These successful models, however, are tuned mostly for use with regularly sampled data such as images, audio and video. Despite the successful application of the architecture on these types of media, applying …
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；The Australian Center for Visual Technologies（澳大利亚视觉技术中心）；The University of Queensland（昆士兰大学）
We propose a very simple, efficient yet surprisingly effective feature extraction method for face recognition (about 20 lines of Matlab code), which is mainly inspired by spatial pyramid pooling in generic image classification. We show that features formed by simply pooling local patches over a multi-level pyramid, coupled with a linear classifier, can significantly outperform most recent face recognition methods. The simplicity of our feature extraction procedure is demonstrated by the fact that no learning is involved (except PCA whitening). We show that, multi-level spatial pooling and dens…
Generating talking head videos through a face image and a piece of speech audio still contains many challenges. ie, unnatural head movement, distorted expression, and identity modification. We argue that these issues are mainly because of learning from the coupled 2D motion fields. On the other hand, explicitly using 3D information also suffers problems of stiff expression and incoherent video. We present SadTalker, which generates 3D motion coefficients (head pose, expression) of the 3DMM from audio and implicitly modulates a novel 3D-aware face render for talking head generation. To learn th…
STAG: Spatio-temporal Evolving Structural Representation of Action Units for Micro-expression Recognition
Vision Intelligence and Machine Learning (VIML) Group, School of Computing and Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Mandi（印度理工学院曼迪分校计算与电气工程学院视觉智能与机器学习（VIML）实验室）；Indian Institute of Information Technology Bhagalpur（印度信息技术学院巴加尔普尔分校）
iFADIT: Invertible Face Anonymization via Disentangled Identity Transform
Chongqing Key Laboratory of Image Cognition（重庆图像认知重点实验室）；State Key Laboratory of Integrated Services Networks（综合业务网国家重点实验室）；Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications（重庆邮电大学）；Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）
