J$\hat{\text{A}}$A-Net: Joint Facial Action Unit Detection and Face Alignment via Adaptive Attention
China University of Mining and Technology(中国矿业大学);Shanghai Jiao Tong University(上海交通大学);Tianjin University(天津大学);Monash University(莫纳什大学);East China Normal University(华东师范大学)
Zhiwen Shao, Zhilei Liu, Jianfei Cai, Lizhuang Ma
备注:
This paper is the extended version of arXiv:1803.05588, and is accepted by International Journal of Computer Vision
Facial action unit (AU) detection and face alignment are two highly correlated tasks, since facial landmarks can provide precise AU locations to facilitate the extraction of meaningful local features for AU detection. However, most existing AU detection works handle the two tasks independently by treating face alignment as a preprocessing, and often use landmarks to predefine a fixed region or attention for each AU. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end deep learning framework for joint AU detection and face alignment, which has not been explored before. In particular, multi-scale shared feature is learned firstly, and high-level feature of face alignment is fed into AU detection. Moreover, to extract precise local features, we propose an adaptive attention learning module to refine the attention map of each AU adaptively. Finally, the assembled local features are integrated with face alignment feature and global feature for AU detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework (i) significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art AU detection methods on the challenging BP4D, DISFA, GFT and BP4D+ benchmarks, (ii) can adaptively capture the irregular region of each AU, (iii) achieves competitive performance for face alignment, and (iv) also works well under partial occlusions and non-frontal poses. The code for our method is available at https://github.com/ZhiwenShao/PyTorch-JAANet.
Human face analysis is an important task in computer vision. According to cognitive-psychological studies, facial dynamics could provide crucial cues for face analysis. The motion of a facial local region in facial expression is related to the motion of other facial local regions. In this paper, a novel deep learning approach, named facial dynamics interpreter network, has been proposed to interpret the important relations between local dynamics for estimating facial traits from expression sequence. The facial dynamics interpreter network is designed to be able to encode a relational importanc…
Northwestern University(西北大学);IBM T. J. Watson(IBM托马斯·J·沃森研究中心)
The way people look in terms of facial attributes (ethnicity, hair color, facial hair, etc.) and the clothes or accessories they wear (sunglasses, hat, hoodies, etc.) is highly dependent on geo-location and weather condition, respectively. This work explores, for the first time, the use of this contextual information, as people with wearable cameras walk across different neighborhoods of a city, in order to learn a rich feature representation for facial attribute classification, without the costly manual annotation required by previous methods. By tracking the faces of casual walkers on more t…
National Institute of Technology Karnataka(卡纳塔克国立理工学院)
The proposed framework in this paper has the primary objective of classifying the facial expression shown by a person. These classifiable expressions can be any one of the six universal emotions along with the neutral emotion. After the initial facial localization is performed, facial landmark detection and feature extraction are applied where in the landmarks are determined to be the fiducial features: the eyebrows, eyes, nose and lips. This is primarily done using state-of-the-art facial landmark detection algorithms as well as traditional edge and corner point detection methods using Sobel …
Facial landmark detection is a vital step for numerous facial image analysis applications. Although some deep learning-based methods have achieved good performances in this task, they are often not suitable for running on mobile devices. Such methods rely on networks with many parameters, which makes the training and inference time-consuming. Training lightweight neural networks such as MobileNets are often challenging, and the models might have low accuracy. Inspired by knowledge distillation (KD), this paper presents a novel loss function to train a lightweight Student network (e.g., MobileN…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign(伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校)
Talking face synthesis has been widely studied in either appearance-based or warping-based methods. Previous works mostly utilize single face image as a source, and generate novel facial animations by merging other person's facial features. However, some facial regions like eyes or teeth, which may be hidden in the source image, can not be synthesized faithfully and stably. In this paper, We present a landmark driven two-stream network to generate faithful talking facial animation, in which more facial details are created, preserved and transferred from multiple source images instead of a sing…
The paper explores the topic of Facial Action Unit (FAU) detection in the wild. In particular, we are interested in answering the following questions: (1) how useful are residual connections across dense blocks for face analysis? (2) how useful is the information from a network trained for categorical Facial Expression Recognition (FER) for the task of FAU detection? The proposed network (ResiDen) exploits dense blocks along with residual connections and uses auxiliary information from a FER network. The experiments are performed on the EmotionNet and DISFA datasets. The experiments show the u…
CUNY City College(纽约市立大学城市学院);CUNY Graduate Center(纽约市立大学研究生中心);SUNY Binghamton University(纽约州立大学宾汉姆顿大学)
In this paper, we propose a deep learning based approach for facial action unit detection by enhancing and cropping the regions of interest. The approach is implemented by adding two novel nets (layers): the enhancing layers and the cropping layers, to a pretrained CNN model. For the enhancing layers, we designed an attention map based on facial landmark features and applied it to a pretrained neural network to conduct enhanced learning (The E-Net). For the cropping layers, we crop facial regions around the detected landmarks and design convolutional layers to learn deeper features for each fa…
Universidade Federal de Pernambuco(伯南布哥联邦大学);Center for Advanced Methods in Biological Image Analysis(生物图像分析高级方法中心);California Institute of Technology(加州理工学院)
We present a new end-to-end network architecture for facial expression recognition with an attention model. It focuses attention in the human face and uses a Gaussian space representation for expression recognition. We devise this architecture based on two fundamental complementary components: (1) facial image correction and attention and (2) facial expression representation and classification. The first component uses an encoder-decoder style network and a convolutional feature extractor that are pixel-wise multiplied to obtain a feature attention map. The second component is responsible for …
Facial attractiveness enhancement has been an interesting application in Computer Vision and Graphics over these years. It aims to generate a more attractive face via manipulations on image and geometry structure while preserving face identity. In this paper, we propose the first Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for enhancing facial attractiveness in both geometry and appearance aspects, which we call "FA-GANs". FA-GANs contain two branches and enhance facial attractiveness in two perspectives: facial geometry and facial appearance. Each branch consists of individual GANs with the appear…
University of Science and Technology of China(中国科学技术大学)
Facial action unit recognition is an important task for facial analysis. Owing to the complex collection environment, facial action unit recognition in the wild is still challenging. The 3rd competition on affective behavior analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) has provided large amount of facial images with facial action unit annotations. In this paper, we introduce a facial action unit recognition method based on transfer learning. We first use available facial images with expression labels to train the feature extraction network. Then we fine-tune the network for facial action unit recognition.
In this paper, an approach to the problem of automatic facial feature extraction from a still frontal posed image and classification and recognition of facial expression and hence emotion and mood of a person is presented. Feed forward back propagation neural network is used as a classifier for classifying the expressions of supplied face into seven basic categories like surprise, neutral, sad, disgust, fear, happy and angry. For face portion segmentation and localization, morphological image processing operations are used. Permanent facial features like eyebrows, eyes, mouth and nose are extr…
Fujitsu Laboratories of America(富士通美国实验室);Tilburg University(蒂尔堡大学);University of Pittsburgh(匹兹堡大学);Carnegie Mellon University(卡内基梅隆大学)
Critical obstacles in training classifiers to detect facial actions are the limited sizes of annotated video databases and the relatively low frequencies of occurrence of many actions. To address these problems, we propose an approach that makes use of facial expression generation. Our approach reconstructs the 3D shape of the face from each video frame, aligns the 3D mesh to a canonical view, and then trains a GAN-based network to synthesize novel images with facial action units of interest. To evaluate this approach, a deep neural network was trained on two separate datasets: One network was…
Facial expression recognition has been an active area in computer vision with application areas including animation, social robots, personalized banking, etc. In this study, we explore the problem of image classification for detecting facial expressions based on features extracted from pre-trained convolutional neural networks trained on ImageNet database. Features are extracted and transferred to a Linear Support Vector Machine for classification. All experiments are performed on two publicly available datasets such as JAFFE and CK+ database. The results show that representations learned from…
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem(耶路撒冷希伯来大学);Microsoft Research(微软研究院);Cambridge University(剑桥大学)
We consider the task of predicting various traits of a person given an image of their face. We estimate both objective traits, such as gender, ethnicity and hair-color; as well as subjective traits, such as the emotion a person expresses or whether he is humorous or attractive. For sizeable experimentation, we contribute a new Face Attributes Dataset (FAD), having roughly 200,000 attribute labels for the above traits, for over 10,000 facial images. Due to the recent surge of research on Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), we begin by using a CNN architecture for estimating facial attrib…
Seoul National University of Science and Technology(首尔科技大学);Kumoh National Institute of Technology(金乌国立工科大学)
Facial expression in-the-wild is essential for various interactive computing domains. In this paper, we proposed an extended version of DAN model to address the VA estimation and facial expression challenges introduced in ABAW 2022. Our method produced preliminary results of 0.44 of mean CCC value for the VA estimation task, and 0.33 of the average F1 score for the expression classification task.
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology(韩国高等科学技术院);Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute(电子通信研究院)
Temporal information can provide useful features for recognizing facial expressions. However, to manually design useful features requires a lot of effort. In this paper, to reduce this effort, a deep learning technique which is regarded as a tool to automatically extract useful features from raw data, is adopted. Our deep network is based on two different models. The first deep network extracts temporal geometry features from temporal facial landmark points, while the other deep network extracts temporal appearance features from image sequences . These two models are combined in order to boost…
W-Net: A Facial Feature-Guided Face Super-Resolution Network
School of Information Science and Engineering, Shandong University(山东大学信息科学与工程学院);Center for Optics Research and Engineering (CORE), Shandong University(山东大学光学研究与工程中心)
School of Communication Engineering, Hangzhou Dianzi University(杭州电子科技大学通信工程学院)
We present to recover the complete 3D facial geometry from a single depth view by proposing an Attention Guided Generative Adversarial Networks (AGGAN). In contrast to existing work which normally requires two or more depth views to recover a full 3D facial geometry, the proposed AGGAN is able to generate a dense 3D voxel grid of the face from a single unconstrained depth view. Specifically, AGGAN encodes the 3D facial geometry within a voxel space and utilizes an attention-guided GAN to model the illposed 2.5D depth-3D mapping. Multiple loss functions, which enforce the 3D facial geometry con…
Xiamen University(厦门大学);Xiamen University of Technology(厦门理工学院)
Recently, facial attribute classification (FAC) has attracted significant attention in the computer vision community. Great progress has been made along with the availability of challenging FAC datasets. However, conventional FAC methods usually firstly pre-process the input images (i.e., perform face detection and alignment) and then predict facial attributes. These methods ignore the inherent dependencies among these tasks (i.e., face detection, facial landmark localization and FAC). Moreover, some methods using convolutional neural network are trained based on the fixed loss weights without…
Malaviya National Institute of Technology(马拉维亚国家理工学院)
Facial expressions have essential cues to infer the humans state of mind, that conveys adequate information to understand individuals actual feelings. Thus, automatic facial expression recognition is an interesting and crucial task to interpret the humans cognitive state through the machine. In this paper, we proposed an Exigent Features Preservative Network (EXPERTNet), to describe the features of the facial expressions. The EXPERTNet extracts only pertinent features and neglect others by using exigent feature (ExFeat) block, mainly comprises of elective layer. Specifically, elective layer se…
Wuhan Institute of Technology(武汉工程大学);Harbin Institute of Technology(哈尔滨工业大学);Wuhan University(武汉大学)
Recently, face super-resolution (FSR) methods either feed whole face image into convolutional neural networks (CNNs) or utilize extra facial priors (e.g., facial parsing maps, facial landmarks) to focus on facial structure, thereby maintaining the consistency of the facial structure while restoring facial details. However, the limited receptive fields of CNNs and inaccurate facial priors will reduce the naturalness and fidelity of the reconstructed face. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm based on the self-attention mechanism (i.e., the core of Transformer) to fully explore the represe…
With the development of deep learning, the structure of convolution neural network is becoming more and more complex and the performance of object recognition is getting better. However, the classification mechanism of convolution neural networks is still an unsolved core problem. The main problem is that convolution neural networks have too many parameters, which makes it difficult to analyze them. In this paper, we design and train a convolution neural network based on the expression recognition, and explore the classification mechanism of the network. By using the Deconvolution visualizatio…
Neural network based algorithms has shown success in many applications. In image processing, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) can be trained to categorize facial expressions of images of human faces. In this work, we create a system that masks a student's face with a emoji of the respective emotion. Our system consists of three building blocks: face detection using Histogram of Gradients (HoG) and Support Vector Machine (SVM), facial expression categorization using CNN trained on FER2013 dataset, and finally masking the respective emoji back onto the student's face via homography estimation…
This work focuses on complete 3D facial geometry prediction, including 3D facial alignment via 3D face modeling and face orientation estimation using the proposed multi-task, multi-modal, and multi-representation landmark refinement network (M$^3$-LRN). Our focus is on the important facial attributes, 3D landmarks, and we fully utilize their embedded information to guide 3D facial geometry learning. We first propose a multi-modal and multi-representation feature aggregation for landmark refinement. Next, we are the first to study 3DMM regression from sparse 3D landmarks and utilize multi-repre…
Hunan University(湖南大学);Changsha University of Science and Technology(长沙理工大学)
Face morphing attack is proved to be a serious threat to the existing face recognition systems. Although a few face morphing detection methods have been put forward, the face morphing accomplice's facial restoration remains a challenging problem. In this paper, a face de-morphing generative adversarial network (FD-GAN) is proposed to restore the accomplice's facial image. It utilizes a symmetric dual network architecture and two levels of restoration losses to separate the identity feature of the morphing accomplice. By exploiting the captured facial image (containing the criminal's identity) …
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…
Residual-based neural networks have shown remarkable results in various visual recognition tasks including Facial Expression Recognition (FER). Despite the tremendous efforts have been made to improve the performance of FER systems using DNNs, existing methods are not generalizable enough for practical applications. This paper introduces Bounded Residual Gradient Networks (BReG-Net) for facial expression recognition, in which the shortcut connection between the input and the output of the ResNet module is replaced with a differentiable function with a bounded gradient. This configuration preve…
Classifying facial expressions into different categories requires capturing regional distortions of facial landmarks. We believe that second-order statistics such as covariance is better able to capture such distortions in regional facial fea- tures. In this work, we explore the benefits of using a man- ifold network structure for covariance pooling to improve facial expression recognition. In particular, we first employ such kind of manifold networks in conjunction with tradi- tional convolutional networks for spatial pooling within in- dividual image feature maps in an end-to-end deep learni…
Face identification/recognition has significantly advanced over the past years. However, most of the proposed approaches rely on static RGB frames and on neutral facial expressions. This has two disadvantages. First, important facial shape cues are ignored. Second, facial deformations due to expressions can have an impact on the performance of such a method. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for dynamic 3D face identification/recognition based on facial keypoints. Each dynamic sequence of facial expressions is represented as a spatio-temporal graph, which is constructed using 3D faci…
Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) is an attractive camera-based health monitoring method that can measure the heart rhythm from facial videos. Many well-established deep-learning models have been reported to measure heart rate (HR) and heart rate variability (HRV). However, most of these models usually require a 30-second facial video and enormous computational resources to obtain accurate and robust results, which significantly limits their applications in real-world scenarios. Hence, we propose a lightweight pulse extraction network, FastBVP-Net, to quickly measure heart rhythm via facial v…
Shenzhen University(深圳大学);Hanshan Normal University(韩山师范学院);Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Society(深圳市人工智能与机器人研究院)
Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs)-based facial landmark detection methods have achieved great success. However, most of existing CNN-based facial landmark detection methods have not attempted to activate multiple correlated facial parts and learn different semantic features from them that they can not accurately model the relationships among the local details and can not fully explore more discriminative and fine semantic features, thus they suffer from partial occlusions and large pose variations. To address these problems, we propose a cross-order cross-semantic deep network (CC…
University of Cambridge(剑桥大学);Indian Institute of Science(印度科学理工学院)
Disguised face identification (DFI) is an extremely challenging problem due to the numerous variations that can be introduced using different disguises. This paper introduces a deep learning framework to first detect 14 facial key-points which are then utilized to perform disguised face identification. Since the training of deep learning architectures relies on large annotated datasets, two annotated facial key-points datasets are introduced. The effectiveness of the facial keypoint detection framework is presented for each keypoint. The superiority of the key-point detection framework is also…
We propose a self-supervised framework for learning facial attributes by simply watching videos of a human face speaking, laughing, and moving over time. To perform this task, we introduce a network, Facial Attributes-Net (FAb-Net), that is trained to embed multiple frames from the same video face-track into a common low-dimensional space. With this approach, we make three contributions: first, we show that the network can leverage information from multiple source frames by predicting confidence/attention masks for each frame; second, we demonstrate that using a curriculum learning regime impr…
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…
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…
We propose a novel facial Anchors and Contours Estimation framework, ACE-Net, for fine-level face alignment tasks. ACE-Net predicts facial anchors and contours that are richer than traditional facial landmarks while overcoming ambiguities and inconsistencies in their definitions. We introduce a weakly supervised loss enabling ACE-Net to learn from existing facial landmarks datasets without the need for reannotation. Instead, synthetic data, from which GT contours can be easily obtained, is used during training to bridge the density gap between landmarks and true facial contours. We evaluate th…
Bar-Ilan University(巴伊兰大学);Roma Tre University(罗马第三大学)
The accurate localization of facial landmarks is at the core of face analysis tasks, such as face recognition and facial expression analysis, to name a few. In this work, we propose a novel localization approach based on a deep learning architecture that utilizes cascaded subnetworks with convolutional neural network units. The cascaded units of the first subnetwork estimate heatmap-based encodings of the landmarks locations, while the cascaded units of the second subnetwork receive as input the output of the corresponding heatmap estimation units, and refine them through regression. The propo…
We have developed convolutional neural networks (CNN) for a facial expression recognition task. The goal is to classify each facial image into one of the seven facial emotion categories considered in this study. We trained CNN models with different depth using gray-scale images. We developed our models in Torch and exploited Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) computation in order to expedite the training process. In addition to the networks performing based on raw pixel data, we employed a hybrid feature strategy by which we trained a novel CNN model with the combination of raw pixel data and Hist…
In this paper, the multi-task learning of lightweight convolutional neural networks is studied for face identification and classification of facial attributes (age, gender, ethnicity) trained on cropped faces without margins. The necessity to fine-tune these networks to predict facial expressions is highlighted. Several models are presented based on MobileNet, EfficientNet and RexNet architectures. It was experimentally demonstrated that they lead to near state-of-the-art results in age, gender and race recognition on the UTKFace dataset and emotion classification on the AffectNet dataset. Mor…
In this paper, we propose a new deep framework which predicts facial attributes and leverage it as a soft modality to improve face identification performance. Our model is an end to end framework which consists of a convolutional neural network (CNN) whose output is fanned out into two separate branches; the first branch predicts facial attributes while the second branch identifies face images. Contrary to the existing multi-task methods which only use a shared CNN feature space to train these two tasks jointly, we fuse the predicted attributes with the features from the face modality in order…
University of Science and Technology of China(中国科学技术大学)
Current works formulate facial action unit (AU) recognition as a supervised learning problem, requiring fully AU-labeled facial images during training. It is challenging if not impossible to provide AU annotations for large numbers of facial images. Fortunately, AUs appear on all facial images, whether manually labeled or not, satisfy the underlying anatomic mechanisms and human behavioral habits. In this paper, we propose a deep semi-supervised framework for facial action unit recognition from partially AU-labeled facial images. Specifically, the proposed deep semi-supervised AU recognition a…
Information Sciences Institute, USC(南加州大学信息科学研究所);The Open University of Israel(以色列开放大学);Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Systems, USC(南加州大学机器人与智能系统研究所)
We present a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) design for facial landmark coordinate regression. We examine the intermediate features of a standard CNN trained for landmark detection and show that features extracted from later, more specialized layers capture rough landmark locations. This provides a natural means of applying differential treatment midway through the network, tweaking processing based on facial alignment. The resulting Tweaked CNN model (TCNN) harnesses the robustness of CNNs for landmark detection, in an appearance-sensitive manner without training multi-part or multi-…
Monocular 3D facial shape reconstruction from a single 2D facial image has been an active research area due to its wide applications. Inspired by the success of deep neural networks (DNN), we propose a DNN-based approach for End-to-End 3D FAce Reconstruction (UH-E2FAR) from a single 2D image. Different from recent works that reconstruct and refine the 3D face in an iterative manner using both an RGB image and an initial 3D facial shape rendering, our DNN model is end-to-end, and thus the complicated 3D rendering process can be avoided. Moreover, we integrate in the DNN architecture two compone…
Sharif University of Technology(谢里夫理工大学);imec(imec研究所);Ghent University(根特大学)
We present a novel approach to generating photo-realistic images of a face with accurate lip sync, given an audio input. By using a recurrent neural network, we achieved mouth landmarks based on audio features. We exploited the power of conditional generative adversarial networks to produce highly-realistic face conditioned on a set of landmarks. These two networks together are capable of producing a sequence of natural faces in sync with an input audio track.
Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar(甘地讷格尔印度理工学院);Osaka University(大阪大学)
Recognizing facial expressions is one of the central problems in computer vision. Temporal image sequences have useful spatio-temporal features for recognizing expressions. In this paper, we propose a new 3D Convolution Neural Network (CNN) that can be trained end-to-end for facial expression recognition on temporal image sequences without using facial landmarks. More specifically, a novel 3D convolutional layer that we call Local Binary Volume (LBV) layer is proposed. The LBV layer, when used with our newly proposed LBVCNN network, achieve comparable results compared to state-of-the-art landm…
University of California, Davis(加利福尼亚大学戴维斯分校);Zhejiang University(浙江大学)
We present a method for localizing facial keypoints on animals by transferring knowledge gained from human faces. Instead of directly finetuning a network trained to detect keypoints on human faces to animal faces (which is sub-optimal since human and animal faces can look quite different), we propose to first adapt the animal images to the pre-trained human detection network by correcting for the differences in animal and human face shape. We first find the nearest human neighbors for each animal image using an unsupervised shape matching method. We use these matches to train a thin plate spl…
The University of Texas at Dallas(德克萨斯大学达拉斯分校);L. D. College of Engineering(L. D.工程学院);Ahmedabad University(艾哈迈达巴德大学);Dosepack LLC(Dosepack有限责任公司);Meditab Software Inc.(Meditab软件公司)
How can we improve the facial soft-biometric classification with help of the human visual system? This paper explores the use of saliency which is equivalent to the human visual system to classify Age, Gender and Facial Expression soft-biometric for facial images. Using the Deep Multi-level Network (ML-Net) [1] and off-the-shelf face detector [2], we propose our approach - SAF-BAGE, which first detects the face in the test image, increases the Bounding Box (B-Box) margin by 30%, finds the saliency map using ML-Net, with 30% reweighted ratio of saliency map, it multiplies with the input cropped…
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…
Recognizing the expressions of partially occluded faces is a challenging computer vision problem. Previous expression recognition methods, either overlooked this issue or resolved it using extreme assumptions. Motivated by the fact that the human visual system is adept at ignoring the occlusion and focus on non-occluded facial areas, we propose a landmark-guided attention branch to find and discard corrupted features from occluded regions so that they are not used for recognition. An attention map is first generated to indicate if a specific facial part is occluded and guide our model to atten…
In face-related applications with a public available dataset, synthesizing non-linear facial variations (e.g., facial expression, head-pose, illumination, etc.) through a generative model is helpful in addressing the lack of training data. In reality, however, there is insufficient data to even train the generative model for face synthesis. In this paper, we propose Differential Generative Adversarial Networks (D-GAN) that can perform photo-realistic face synthesis even when training data is small. Two discriminators are devised to ensure the generator to approximate a face manifold, which can…
Capsule neural network is a new and popular technique in deep learning. However, the traditional capsule neural network does not extract features sufficiently before the dynamic routing between the capsules. In this paper, the one Double Enhanced Capsule Neural Network (E2-Capsnet) that uses AU-aware attention for facial expression recognition (FER) is proposed. The E2-Capsnet takes advantage of dynamic routing between the capsules, and has two enhancement modules which are beneficial for FER. The first enhancement module is the convolutional neural network with AU-aware attention, which can h…