Current facial expression recognition methods fail to simultaneously cope with pose and subject variations.
In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised adversarial domain adaptation method which can alleviate both variations at the same time. Specially, our method consists of three learning strategies: adversarial domain adaptation learning, cross adversarial feature learning, and reconstruction learning. The first aims to learn pose- and expression-related feature representations in the source domain and adapt both feature distributions to that of the target domain by imposing adversarial learning. By using personalized adversarial domain adaptation, this learning strategy can alleviate subject variations and exploit information from the source domain to help learning in the target domain.
The second serves to perform feature disentanglement between pose- and expression-related feature representations by impulsing pose-related feature representations expression-undistinguished and the expression-related feature representations pose-undistinguished.
The last can further boost feature learning by applying face image reconstructions so that the learned expression-related feature representations are more pose- and identity-robust.
Experimental results on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne（洛桑联邦理工学院）；Istanbul Technical University（伊斯坦布尔理工大学）
Cross-domain synthesizing realistic faces to learn deep models has attracted increasing attention for facial expression analysis as it helps to improve the performance of expression recognition accuracy despite having small number of real training images. However, learning from synthetic face images can be problematic due to the distribution discrepancy between low-quality synthetic images and real face images and may not achieve the desired performance when the learned model applies to real world scenarios. To this end, we propose a new attribute guided face image synthesis to perform a trans…
Innopolis University（因诺波利斯大学）；Institute of Data Science & AI（数据科学与人工智能研究所）
Bringing empathy to a computerized system could significantly improve the quality of human-computer communications, as soon as machines would be able to understand customer intentions and better serve their needs. According to different studies (Literature Review), visual information is one of the most important channels of human interaction and contains significant behavioral signals, that may be captured from facial expressions. Therefore, it is consistent and natural that the research in the field of Facial Expression Recognition (FER) has acquired increased interest over the past decade du…
Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）；MIT Media Lab（麻省理工学院媒体实验室）；Augsburg University（奥格斯堡大学）；Samsung AI Center（三星人工智能中心）；Imperial College（帝国理工学院）
Detecting facial action units (AU) is one of the fundamental steps in automatic recognition of facial expression of emotions and cognitive states. Though there have been a variety of approaches proposed for this task, most of these models are trained only for the specific target AUs, and as such they fail to easily adapt to the task of recognition of new AUs (i.e., those not initially used to train the target models). In this paper, we propose a deep learning approach for facial AU detection that can easily and in a fast manner adapt to a new AU or target subject by leveraging only a few label…
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；University of Twente（特文特大学）
We present a novel approach for supervised domain adaptation that is based upon the probabilistic framework of Gaussian processes (GPs). Specifically, we introduce domain-specific GPs as local experts for facial expression classification from face images. The adaptation of the classifier is facilitated in probabilistic fashion by conditioning the target expert on multiple source experts. Furthermore, in contrast to existing adaptation approaches, we also learn a target expert from available target data solely. Then, a single and confident classifier is obtained by combining the predictions fro…
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…
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT（麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室）；Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT（麻省理工学院电气工程与计算机科学系）；Media Lab, MIT（麻省理工学院媒体实验室）
Previous research on automatic pain estimation from facial expressions has focused primarily on "one-size-fits-all" metrics (such as PSPI). In this work, we focus on directly estimating each individual's self-reported visual-analog scale (VAS) pain metric, as this is considered the gold standard for pain measurement. The VAS pain score is highly subjective and context-dependent, and its range can vary significantly among different persons. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel two-stage personalized model, named DeepFaceLIFT, for automatic estimation of VAS. This model is based on (1) Neu…
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…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；Huawei CBG（华为消费者业务集团）
Learning a dense 3D model with fine-scale details from a single facial image is highly challenging and ill-posed. To address this problem, many approaches fit smooth geometries through facial prior while learning details as additional displacement maps or personalized basis. However, these techniques typically require vast datasets of paired multi-view data or 3D scans, whereas such datasets are scarce and expensive. To alleviate heavy data dependency, we present a robust texture-guided geometric detail recovery approach using only a single in-the-wild facial image. More specifically, our meth…
Roux Institute（鲁克斯研究所）；Northeastern University（东北大学）；University of Maine（缅因大学）
We lay the groundwork for research in the algorithmic comprehension of infant faces, in anticipation of applications from healthcare to psychology, especially in the early prediction of developmental disorders. Specifically, we introduce the first-ever dataset of infant faces annotated with facial landmark coordinates and pose attributes, demonstrate the inadequacies of existing facial landmark estimation algorithms in the infant domain, and train new state-of-the-art models that significantly improve upon those algorithms using domain adaptation techniques. We touch on the closely related tas…
We propose an approach for unsupervised domain adaptation for the task of estimating someone's age from a given face image. In order to avoid the propagation of racial bias in most publicly available face image datasets into the inefficacy of models trained on them, we perform domain adaptation to motivate the predictor to learn features that are invariant to ethnicity, enhancing the generalization performance across faces of people from different ethnic backgrounds. Exploiting the ordinality of age, we also impose ranking constraints on the prediction of the model and design our model such th…
University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Snap Inc.（Snap公司）；Bytedance Inc.（字节跳动公司）
Some tasks, such as surface normals or single-view depth estimation, require per-pixel ground truth that is difficult to obtain on real images but easy to obtain on synthetic. However, models learned on synthetic images often do not generalize well to real images due to the domain shift. Our key idea to improve domain adaptation is to introduce a separate anchor task (such as facial landmarks) whose annotations can be obtained at no cost or are already available on both synthetic and real datasets. To further leverage the implicit relationship between the anchor and main tasks, we apply our \f…
Personalized Feature Translation for Expression Recognition: An Efficient Source-Free Domain Adaptation Method
LIVIA, Dept. of Systems Engineering, ETS Montreal, Canada（蒙特利尔工程学院系统工程系LIVIA）；LIVIA, Dept. of Software and IT Engineering, ETS Montreal, Canada（蒙特利尔工程学院软件与IT工程系LIVIA）；Dept. of Health, Kinesiology, & Applied Physiology, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada（蒙特利尔大学健康、运动科学与应用生理学系）；Montreal Behavioural Medicine Centre, CIUSSS Nord-de-l’Ile-de-Montréal, Canada（蒙特利尔行为医学中心，北岛-蒙特利尔CIUSSS）；Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada（皇后大学电气与计算机工程系）
Pain is a personal, subjective experience that is commonly evaluated through visual analog scales (VAS). While this is often convenient and useful, automatic pain detection systems can reduce pain score acquisition efforts in large-scale studies by estimating it directly from the participants' facial expressions. In this paper, we propose a novel two-stage learning approach for VAS estimation: first, our algorithm employs Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) to automatically estimate Prkachin and Solomon Pain Intensity (PSPI) levels from face images. The estimated scores are then fed into the pers…
University of Trento（特伦托大学）；Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK)（布鲁诺·凯斯勒基金会（FBK））
Automatically understanding emotions from visual data is a fundamental task for human behaviour understanding. While models devised for Facial Expression Recognition (FER) have demonstrated excellent performances on many datasets, they often suffer from severe performance degradation when trained and tested on different datasets due to domain shift. In addition, as face images are considered highly sensitive data, the accessibility to large-scale datasets for model training is often denied. In this work, we tackle the above-mentioned problems by proposing the first Source-Free Unsupervised Dom…
Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）；Microsoft Mixed Reality & AI Lab（微软混合现实与人工智能实验室）
Speech-driven 3D facial animation has been widely explored, with applications in gaming, character animation, virtual reality, and telepresence systems. State-of-the-art methods deform the face topology of the target actor to sync the input audio without considering the identity-specific speaking style and facial idiosyncrasies of the target actor, thus, resulting in unrealistic and inaccurate lip movements. To address this, we present Imitator, a speech-driven facial expression synthesis method, which learns identity-specific details from a short input video and produces novel facial expressi…
University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Microsoft Cloud and AI（微软云与人工智能部门）；Microsoft（微软）
Traditional methods for image-based 3D face reconstruction and facial motion retargeting fit a 3D morphable model (3DMM) to the face, which has limited modeling capacity and fail to generalize well to in-the-wild data. Use of deformation transfer or multilinear tensor as a personalized 3DMM for blendshape interpolation does not address the fact that facial expressions result in different local and global skin deformations in different persons. Moreover, existing methods learn a single albedo per user which is not enough to capture the expression-specific skin reflectance variations. We propose…
Current facial expression recognition systems demand an expensive re-training routine when deployed to different scenarios than they were trained for. Biasing them towards learning specific facial characteristics, instead of performing typical transfer learning methods, might help these systems to maintain high performance in different tasks, but with a reduced training effort. In this paper, we propose Contrastive Inhibitory Adaptati On (CIAO), a mechanism that adapts the last layer of facial encoders to depict specific affective characteristics on different datasets. CIAO presents an improve…
Fudan University（复旦大学）；The Pennsylvania State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）
Facial aging and facial rejuvenation analyze a given face photograph to predict a future look or estimate a past look of the person. To achieve this, it is critical to preserve human identity and the corresponding aging progression and regression with high accuracy. However, existing methods cannot simultaneously handle these two objectives well. We propose a novel generative adversarial network based approach, named the Conditional Multi-Adversarial AutoEncoder with Ordinal Regression (CMAAE-OR). It utilizes an age estimation technique to control the aging accuracy and takes a high-level feat…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Image Derivative Inc（Image Derivative公司）
We present a novel semantic model for human head defined with neural radiance field. The 3D-consistent head model consist of a set of disentangled and interpretable bases, and can be driven by low-dimensional expression coefficients. Thanks to the powerful representation ability of neural radiance field, the constructed model can represent complex facial attributes including hair, wearings, which can not be represented by traditional mesh blendshape. To construct the personalized semantic facial model, we propose to define the bases as several multi-level voxel fields. With a short monocular R…
Despite excellent progress has been made, the performance of deep learning based algorithms still heavily rely on specific datasets, which are difficult to extend due to labor-intensive labeling. Moreover, because of the advancement of new applications, initial definition of data annotations might not always meet the requirements of new functionalities. Thus, there is always a great demand in customized data annotations. To address the above issues, we propose the Few-Shot Model Adaptation (FSMA) framework and demonstrate its potential on several important tasks on Faces. The FSMA first acquir…
GAN-Avatar: Controllable Personalized GAN-based Human Head Avatar
Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）；University of Tübingen（图宾根大学）；Meta Reality Labs（Meta现实实验室）；Technical University of Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）
University of Southern California（南加利福尼亚大学）；USC Institute for Creative Technologies（南加州大学创意技术研究所）；Pinscreen（品视科技）
The creation of high-fidelity computer-generated (CG) characters used in film and gaming requires intensive manual labor and a comprehensive set of facial assets to be captured with complex hardware, resulting in high cost and long production cycles. In order to simplify and accelerate this digitization process, we propose a framework for the automatic generation of high-quality dynamic facial assets, including rigs which can be readily deployed for artists to polish. Our framework takes a single scan as input to generate a set of personalized blendshapes, dynamic and physically-based textures…
Data inconsistency and bias are inevitable among different facial expression recognition (FER) datasets due to subjective annotating process and different collecting conditions. Recent works resort to adversarial mechanisms that learn domain-invariant features to mitigate domain shift. However, most of these works focus on holistic feature adaptation, and they ignore local features that are more transferable across different datasets. Moreover, local features carry more detailed and discriminative content for expression recognition, and thus integrating local features may enable fine-grained a…
In this work, we propose an ID-preserving talking head generation framework, which advances previous methods in two aspects. First, as opposed to interpolating from sparse flow, we claim that dense landmarks are crucial to achieving accurate geometry-aware flow fields. Second, inspired by face-swapping methods, we adaptively fuse the source identity during synthesis, so that the network better preserves the key characteristics of the image portrait. Although the proposed model surpasses prior generation fidelity on established benchmarks, to further make the talking head generation qualified f…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；New Jersey Institute of Technology（新泽西理工学院）
This paper employs case-based reasoning (CBR) to capture the personal styles of individual artists and generate the human facial portraits from photos accordingly. For each human artist to be mimicked, a series of cases are firstly built-up from her/his exemplars of source facial photo and hand-drawn sketch, and then its stylization for facial photo is transformed as a style-transferring process of iterative refinement by looking-for and applying best-fit cases in a sense of style optimization. Two models, fitness evaluation model and parameter estimation model, are learned for case retrieval …
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…
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；University of Electronic Science and Technology（电子科技大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）
In this paper, we propose a generative framework that unifies depth-based 3D facial pose tracking and face model adaptation on-the-fly, in the unconstrained scenarios with heavy occlusions and arbitrary facial expression variations. Specifically, we introduce a statistical 3D morphable model that flexibly describes the distribution of points on the surface of the face model, with an efficient switchable online adaptation that gradually captures the identity of the tracked subject and rapidly constructs a suitable face model when the subject changes. Moreover, unlike prior art that employed ICP…
