The current COVID-19 pandemic has shown us that we are still facing unpredictable challenges in our society. The necessary constrain on social interactions affected heavily how we envision and prepare the future of social robots and artificial agents in general. Adapting current affective perception models towards constrained perception based on the hard separation between facial perception and affective understanding would help us to provide robust systems. In this paper, we perform an in-depth analysis of how recognizing affect from persons with masks differs from general facial expression perception. We evaluate how the recently proposed FaceChannel adapts towards recognizing facial expressions from persons with masks. In Our analysis, we evaluate different training and fine-tuning schemes to understand better the impact of masked facial expressions. We also perform specific feature-level visualization to demonstrate how the inherent capabilities of the FaceChannel to learn and combine facial features change when in a constrained social interaction scenario.
INESC TEC；Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto（波尔图大学工程学院）；Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD（弗劳恩霍夫计算机图形研究所 IGD）；TU Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）
The recent Covid-19 pandemic and the fact that wearing masks in public is now mandatory in several countries, created challenges in the use of face recognition systems (FRS). In this work, we address the challenge of masked face recognition (MFR) and focus on evaluating the verification performance in FRS when verifying masked vs unmasked faces compared to verifying only unmasked faces. We propose a methodology that combines the traditional triplet loss and the mean squared error (MSE) intending to improve the robustness of an MFR system in the masked-unmasked comparison mode. The results obta…
One of the key issues in facial expression recognition in the wild (FER-W) is that curating large-scale labeled facial images is challenging due to the inherent complexity and ambiguity of facial images. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a self-supervised simple facial landmark encoding (SimFLE) method that can learn effective encoding of facial landmarks, which are important features for improving the performance of FER-W, without expensive labels. Specifically, we introduce novel FaceMAE module for this purpose. FaceMAE reconstructs masked facial images with elaborately designed semantic …
Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；DATA61, CSIRO（联邦科学与工业研究组织数据61所）
Human eyes concentrate different facial regions during distinct cognitive activities. We study utilising facial visual saliency maps to classify different facial expressions into different emotions. Our results show that our novel method of merely using facial saliency maps can achieve a descent accuracy of 65\%, much higher than the chance level of $1/7$. Furthermore, our approach is of semi-supervision, i.e., our facial saliency maps are generated from a general saliency prediction algorithm that is not explicitly designed for face images. We also discovered that the classification accuracie…
Monash University（莫纳什大学）；Curtin University（科廷大学）；Indian Institute of Technology Ropar（印度理工学院鲁尔基分校）
This paper proposes a self-supervised approach to learn universal facial representations from videos, that can transfer across a variety of facial analysis tasks such as Facial Attribute Recognition (FAR), Facial Expression Recognition (FER), DeepFake Detection (DFD), and Lip Synchronization (LS). Our proposed framework, named MARLIN, is a facial video masked autoencoder, that learns highly robust and generic facial embeddings from abundantly available non-annotated web crawled facial videos. As a challenging auxiliary task, MARLIN reconstructs the spatio-temporal details of the face from the …
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 …
Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD（弗劳恩霍夫计算机图形学研究所IGD）；TU Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）
Biases inherent in both data and algorithms make the fairness of widespread machine learning (ML)-based decision-making systems less than optimal. To improve the trustfulness of such ML decision systems, it is crucial to be aware of the inherent biases in these solutions and to make them more transparent to the public and developers. In this work, we aim at providing a set of explainability tool that analyse the difference in the face recognition models' behaviors when processing different demographic groups. We do that by leveraging higher-order statistical information based on activation map…
City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；COMSATS University Islamabad（COMSATS大学伊斯兰堡校区）
Dynamic facial expression recognition has many useful applications in social networks, multimedia content analysis, security systems and others. This challenging process must be done under recurrent problems of image illumination and low resolution which changes at partial occlusions. This paper aims to produce a new facial expression recognition method based on the changes in the facial muscles. The geometric features are used to specify the facial regions i.e., mouth, eyes, and nose. The generic Fourier shape descriptor in conjunction with elliptic Fourier shape descriptor is used as an attr…
Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur（坎普尔印度理工学院）；Dr. B. C. Roy Engineering College（B. C. 罗伊工程学院）；Jadavpur University（贾达普大学）；University of Sassari（萨萨里大学）
This paper presents a robust and dynamic face recognition technique based on the extraction and matching of devised probabilistic graphs drawn on SIFT features related to independent face areas. The face matching strategy is based on matching individual salient facial graph characterized by SIFT features as connected to facial landmarks such as the eyes and the mouth. In order to reduce the face matching errors, the Dempster-Shafer decision theory is applied to fuse the individual matching scores obtained from each pair of salient facial features. The proposed algorithm is evaluated with the O…
Facial Expression Recognition (FER) is crucial in many research domains because it enables machines to better understand human behaviours. FER methods face the problems of relatively small datasets and noisy data that don't allow classical networks to generalize well. To alleviate these issues, we guide the model to concentrate on specific facial areas like the eyes, the mouth or the eyebrows, which we argue are decisive to recognise facial expressions. We propose the Privileged Attribution Loss (PAL), a method that directs the attention of the model towards the most salient facial regions by …
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Facial Expression Recognition (FER) in the wild is an extremely challenging task in computer vision due to variant backgrounds, low-quality facial images, and the subjectiveness of annotators. These uncertainties make it difficult for neural networks to learn robust features on limited-scale datasets. Moreover, the networks can be easily distributed by the above factors and perform incorrect decisions. Recently, vision transformer (ViT) and data-efficient image transformers (DeiT) present their significant performance in traditional classification tasks. The self-attention mechanism makes tran…
The pandemic of these very recent years has led to a dramatic increase in people wearing protective masks in public venues. This poses obvious challenges to the pervasive use of face recognition technology that now is suffering a decline in performance. One way to address the problem is to revert to face recovery methods as a preprocessing step. Current approaches to face reconstruction and manipulation leverage the ability to model the face manifold, but tend to be generic. We introduce a method that is specific for the recovery of the face image from an image of the same individual wearing a…
Institute of Automation Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology（中国科学院脑科学与智能技术卓越创新中心）
Facial emotion recognition is an essential and important aspect of the field of human-machine interaction. Past research on facial emotion recognition focuses on the laboratory environment. However, it faces many challenges in real-world conditions, i.e., illumination changes, large pose variations and partial or full occlusions. Those challenges lead to different face areas with different degrees of sharpness and completeness. Inspired by this fact, we focus on the authenticity of predictions generated by different <emotion, region> pairs. For example, if only the mouth areas are available an…
Deep learning based facial expression recognition (FER) has received a lot of attention in the past few years. Most of the existing deep learning based FER methods do not consider domain knowledge well, which thereby fail to extract representative features. In this work, we propose a novel FER framework, named Facial Motion Prior Networks (FMPN). Particularly, we introduce an addition branch to generate a facial mask so as to focus on facial muscle moving regions. To guide the facial mask learning, we propose to incorporate prior domain knowledge by using the average differences between neutra…
In this article we propose a method for the recognition of faces with different facial expressions. For recognition we extract feature vectors by using log-Gabor filters of multiple orientations and scales. Using sliding window algorithm and variances -based masking these features are extracted at image regions that are less affected by the changes of facial expressions. Extracted features are passed to the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) -based recognition method. The results of face recognition experiments using expression variant faces showed that the proposed method could achieve higher…
In this paper, we propose a new feature descriptor Cross-Centroid Ripple Pattern (CRIP) for facial expression recognition. CRIP encodes the transitional pattern of a facial expression by incorporating cross-centroid relationship between two ripples located at radius r1 and r2 respectively. These ripples are generated by dividing the local neighborhood region into subregions. Thus, CRIP has ability to preserve macro and micro structural variations in an extensive region, which enables it to deal with side views and spontaneous expressions. Furthermore, gradient information between cross centroi…
Punjab University College of Information Technology（旁遮普大学信息技术学院）；Information Technology University（信息技术大学）
Compared to facial expression recognition, expression synthesis requires a very high-dimensional mapping. This problem exacerbates with increasing image sizes and limits existing expression synthesis approaches to relatively small images. We observe that facial expressions often constitute sparsely distributed and locally correlated changes from one expression to another. By exploiting this observation, the number of parameters in an expression synthesis model can be significantly reduced. Therefore, we propose a constrained version of ridge regression that exploits the local and sparse struct…
A novel Facial Recognition technique with Focusing on Masked Faces
College of Science, Knowledge University（知识大学理学院）；Faculty of Science, Soran University（索兰大学理学院）；Technical College of Informatics, Sulaimani Polytechnic University（苏莱曼尼理工大学信息技术学院）；College of Computer and Information Technology, University of Garmian（加尔米安大学计算机与信息技术学院）；College of Science, University of Sulaimani（苏莱曼尼大学理学院）
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；National Engineering Laboratory for Brain-inspired Intelligence（类脑智能技术国家工程实验室）
2D+3D facial expression recognition (FER) can effectively cope with illumination changes and pose variations by simultaneously merging 2D texture and more robust 3D depth information. Most deep learning-based approaches employ the simple fusion strategy that concatenates the multimodal features directly after fully-connected layers, without considering the different degrees of significance for each modality. Meanwhile, how to focus on both 2D and 3D local features in salient regions is still a great challenge. In this letter, we propose the adaptive fusion network with masks (AFNet-M) for 2D+3…
With the recent world-wide COVID-19 pandemic, using face masks have become an important part of our lives. People are encouraged to cover their faces when in public area to avoid the spread of infection. The use of these face masks has raised a serious question on the accuracy of the facial recognition system used for tracking school/office attendance and to unlock phones. Many organizations use facial recognition as a means of authentication and have already developed the necessary datasets in-house to be able to deploy such a system. Unfortunately, masked faces make it difficult to be detect…
Indian Institute of Information Technology（印度信息技术学院）
Facial expression recognition in videos is an active area of research in computer vision. However, fake facial expressions are difficult to be recognized even by humans. On the other hand, facial micro-expressions generally represent the actual emotion of a person, as it is a spontaneous reaction expressed through human face. Despite of a few attempts made for recognizing micro-expressions, still the problem is far from being a solved problem, which is depicted by the poor rate of accuracy shown by the state-of-the-art methods. A few CNN based approaches are found in the literature to recogniz…
National Engineering Research Center for Multimedia Software（多媒体软件国家工程研究中心）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）
In order to effectively prevent the spread of COVID-19 virus, almost everyone wears a mask during coronavirus epidemic. This almost makes conventional facial recognition technology ineffective in many cases, such as community access control, face access control, facial attendance, facial security checks at train stations, etc. Therefore, it is very urgent to improve the recognition performance of the existing face recognition technology on the masked faces. Most current advanced face recognition approaches are designed based on deep learning, which depend on a large number of face samples. How…
Emotic Masked Autoencoder with Attention Fusion for Facial Expression Recognition
Ho Chi Minh City University of Education（胡志明市师范大学）；University of Economics Ho Chi Minh City-UEH（胡志明市经济大学）；Vietnamese-German University（越南德国大学）；Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology（胡志明市理工大学）；Posts and Telecommunications Institute of Technology（邮电技术学院）
Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been pushing the frontier of the face recognition research in the past years. However, existing general CNN face models generalize poorly to the scenario of occlusions on variable facial areas. Inspired by the fact that a human visual system explicitly ignores occlusions and only focuses on non-occluded facial areas, we propose a mask learning strategy to find and discard the corrupted feature elements for face recognition. A mask dictionary is firstly established by exploiting the differences between the top convoluted features of occluded and oc…
Facial Expression Recognition from static images is a challenging problem in computer vision applications. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), the state-of-the-art method for various computer vision tasks, has had limited success in predicting expressions from faces having extreme poses, illumination, and occlusion conditions. To mitigate this issue, CNNs are often accompanied by techniques like transfer, multi-task, or ensemble learning that often provide high accuracy at the cost of increased computational complexity. In this work, we propose a Part-based Ensemble Transfer Learning network t…
Halmstad University（哈尔姆斯塔德大学）；University of Balearic Islands（巴利阿里群岛大学）
We address the use of selfie ocular images captured with smartphones to estimate age and gender. Partial face occlusion has become an issue due to the mandatory use of face masks. Also, the use of mobile devices has exploded, with the pandemic further accelerating the migration to digital services. However, state-of-the-art solutions in related tasks such as identity or expression recognition employ large Convolutional Neural Networks, whose use in mobile devices is infeasible due to hardware limitations and size restrictions of downloadable applications. To counteract this, we adapt two exist…
University of Westminster（威斯敏斯特大学）；Informatics Institute of Technology（信息学技术学院）
The face mask is an essential sanitaryware in daily lives growing during the pandemic period and is a big threat to current face recognition systems. The masks destroy a lot of details in a large area of face, and it makes it difficult to recognize them even for humans. The evaluation report shows the difficulty well when recognizing masked faces. Rapid development and breakthrough of deep learning in the recent past have witnessed most promising results from face recognition algorithms. But they fail to perform far from satisfactory levels in the unconstrained environment during the challenge…
Shanghai University（上海大学）；JD AI Research（京东人工智能研究院）
Near-infrared to visible (NIR-VIS) face recognition is the most common case in heterogeneous face recognition, which aims to match a pair of face images captured from two different modalities. Existing deep learning based methods have made remarkable progress in NIR-VIS face recognition, while it encounters certain newly-emerged difficulties during the pandemic of COVID-19, since people are supposed to wear facial masks to cut off the spread of the virus. We define this task as NIR-VIS masked face recognition, and find it problematic with the masked face in the NIR probe image. First, the lack…
A Perception CNN for Facial Expression Recognition
School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology（计算机科学与技术学院，哈尔滨工业大学）；School of Software, Northwestern Polytechnical University（软件学院，西北工业大学）；School of Software, Zhengzhou University of Light Industry（软件学院，郑州轻工业学院）；School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University（计算机科学学院，西北工业大学）；School of Science and Engineering, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（科学与工程学院，香港中文大学（深圳））
East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）
Modern face recognition systems (FRS) still fall short when the subjects are wearing facial masks, a common theme in the age of respiratory pandemics. An intuitive partial remedy is to add a mask detector to flag any masked faces so that the FRS can act accordingly for those low-confidence masked faces. In this work, we set out to investigate the potential vulnerability of such FRS equipped with a mask detector, on large-scale masked faces, which might trigger a serious risk, e.g., letting a suspect evade the FRS where both facial identity and mask are undetected. As existing face recognizers …
Concatenation of the deep network representations extracted from different facial patches helps to improve face recognition performance. However, the concatenated facial template increases in size and contains redundant information. Previous solutions aim to reduce the dimensionality of the facial template without considering the occlusion pattern of the facial patches. In this paper, we propose an occlusion-guided compact template learning (OGCTL) approach that only uses the information from visible patches to construct the compact template. The compact face representation is not sensitive to…
Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院）；InsightFace；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
During the COVID-19 coronavirus epidemic, almost everyone wears a facial mask, which poses a huge challenge to deep face recognition. In this workshop, we organize Masked Face Recognition (MFR) challenge and focus on bench-marking deep face recognition methods under the existence of facial masks. In the MFR challenge, there are two main tracks: the InsightFace track and the WebFace260M track. For the InsightFace track, we manually collect a large-scale masked face test set with 7K identities. In addition, we also collect a children test set including 14K identities and a multi-racial test set …
Malviya National Institute of Technology（马尔维亚国家理工学院）
This paper presents a novel descriptor named Region based Extensive Response Index Pattern (RETRaIN) for facial expression recognition. The RETRaIN encodes the relation among the reference and neighboring pixels of facial active regions. These relations are computed by using directional compass mask on an input image and extract the high edge responses in foremost directions. Further extreme edge index positions are selected and encoded into six-bit compact code to reduce feature dimensionality and distinguish between the uniform and non-uniform patterns in the facial features. The performance…
The variation of pose, illumination and expression makes face recognition still a challenging problem. As a pre-processing in holistic approaches, faces are usually aligned by eyes. The proposed method tries to perform a pixel alignment rather than eye-alignment by mapping the geometry of faces to a reference face while keeping their own textures. The proposed geometry alignment not only creates a meaningful correspondence among every pixel of all faces, but also removes expression and pose variations effectively. The geometry alignment is performed pixel-wise, i.e., every pixel of the face is…
Shenzhen University（深圳大学）；Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Society（深圳人工智能与机器人研究院）
Can we construct an explainable face recognition network able to learn a facial part-based feature like eyes, nose, mouth and so forth, without any manual annotation or additionalsion datasets? In this paper, we propose a generic Explainable Channel Loss (ECLoss) to construct an explainable face recognition network. The explainable network trained with ECLoss can easily learn the facial part-based representation on the target convolutional layer, where an individual channel can detect a certain face part. Our experiments on dozens of datasets show that ECLoss achieves superior explainability m…
A recent trend to recognize facial expressions in the real-world scenario is to deploy attention based convolutional neural networks (CNNs) locally to signify the importance of facial regions and, combine it with global facial features and/or other complementary context information for performance gain. However, in the presence of occlusions and pose variations, different channels respond differently, and further that the response intensity of a channel differ across spatial locations. Also, modern facial expression recognition(FER) architectures rely on external sources like landmark detector…
Fraunhofer HHI（弗劳恩霍夫电信研究所）；Humboldt University Berlin（柏林洪堡大学）
A facial morph is a synthetically created image of a face that looks similar to two different individuals and can even trick biometric facial recognition systems into recognizing both individuals. This attack is known as face morphing attack. The process of creating such a facial morph is well documented and a lot of tutorials and software to create them are freely available. Therefore, it is mandatory to be able to detect this kind of fraud to ensure the integrity of the face as reliable biometric feature. In this work, we study the effects of face morphing on the physically correctness of th…
We survey over 100 face datasets constructed between 1976 to 2019 of 145 million images of over 17 million subjects from a range of sources, demographics and conditions. Our historical survey reveals that these datasets are contextually informed, shaped by changes in political motivations, technological capability and current norms. We discuss how such influences mask specific practices (some of which may actually be harmful or otherwise problematic) and make a case for the explicit communication of such details in order to establish a more grounded understanding of the technology's function i…
Centre for Visual Information Technology, KCIS, IIIT Hyderabad（国际信息技术研究所（海得拉巴）KCIS 视觉信息技术中心）
Monocular head pose estimation requires learning a model that computes the intrinsic Euler angles for pose (yaw, pitch, roll) from an input image of human face. Annotating ground truth head pose angles for images in the wild is difficult and requires ad-hoc fitting procedures (which provides only coarse and approximate annotations). This highlights the need for approaches which can train on data captured in controlled environment and generalize on the images in the wild (with varying appearance and illumination of the face). Most present day deep learning approaches which learn a regression fu…
