Deeply learned representations are the state-of-the-art descriptors for face recognition methods. These representations encode latent features that are difficult to explain, compromising the confidence and interpretability of their predictions. Most attempts to explain deep features are visualization techniques that are often open to interpretation. Instead of relying only on visualizations, we use the outputs of hidden layers to predict face attributes. The obtained performance is an indicator of how well the attribute is implicitly learned in that layer of the network. Using a variable selection technique, we also analyze how these semantic concepts are distributed inside each layer, establishing the precise location of relevant neurons for each attribute. According to our experiments, gender, eyeglasses and hat usage can be predicted with over 96% accuracy even when only a single neural output is used to predict each attribute. These performances are less than 3 percentage points lower than the ones achieved by deep supervised face attribute networks. In summary, our experiments show that, inside DCNNs optimized for face identification, there exists latent neurons encoding face attributes almost as accurately as DCNNs optimized for these attributes.
We introduce a deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) architecture to classify facial attributes and recognize face images simultaneously via a shared learning paradigm to improve the accuracy for facial attribute prediction and face recognition performance. In this method, we use facial attributes as an auxiliary source of information to assist CNN features extracted from the face images to improve the face recognition performance. Specifically, we use a shared CNN architecture that jointly predicts facial attributes and recognize face images simultaneously via a shared learning parameters,…
Predicting attributes from face images in the wild is a challenging computer vision problem. To automatically describe face attributes from face containing images, traditionally one needs to cascade three technical blocks --- face localization, facial descriptor construction, and attribute classification --- in a pipeline. As a typical classification problem, face attribute prediction has been addressed using deep learning. Current state-of-the-art performance was achieved by using two cascaded Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), which were specifically trained to learn face localization and…
International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad（海得拉巴国际信息技术学院）；Michigan State University（密歇根州立大学）
Impact due to demographic factors such as age, sex, race, etc., has been studied extensively in automated face recognition systems. However, the impact of \textit{digitally modified} demographic and facial attributes on face recognition is relatively under-explored. In this work, we study the effect of attribute manipulations induced via generative adversarial networks (GANs) on face recognition performance. We conduct experiments on the CelebA dataset by intentionally modifying thirteen attributes using AttGAN and STGAN and evaluating their impact on two deep learning-based face verification …
Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD（弗劳恩霍夫计算机图形学研究所）；Technical University of Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）
Soft-biometrics play an important role in face biometrics and related fields since these might lead to biased performances, threatens the user's privacy, or are valuable for commercial aspects. Current face databases are specifically constructed for the development of face recognition applications. Consequently, these databases contain large amount of face images but lack in the number of attribute annotations and the overall annotation correctness. In this work, we propose MAADFace, a new face annotations database that is characterized by the large number of its high-quality attribute annotat…
Face anti-spoofing is the crucial step to prevent face recognition systems from a security breach. Previous deep learning approaches formulate face anti-spoofing as a binary classification problem. Many of them struggle to grasp adequate spoofing cues and generalize poorly. In this paper, we argue the importance of auxiliary supervision to guide the learning toward discriminative and generalizable cues. A CNN-RNN model is learned to estimate the face depth with pixel-wise supervision, and to estimate rPPG signals with sequence-wise supervision. Then we fuse the estimated depth and rPPG to dist…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Beijing Dilusense Technology Corporation（北京的卢深视科技有限公司）；Cardiff University（卡迪夫大学）
Existing convolutional neural network (CNN) based face recognition algorithms typically learn a discriminative feature mapping, using a loss function that enforces separation of features from different classes and/or aggregation of features within the same class. However, they may suffer from bias in the training data such as uneven sampling density, because they optimize the adjacency relationship of the learned features without considering the proximity of the underlying faces. Moreover, since they only use facial images for training, the learned feature mapping may not correctly indicate th…
We address the problem of bias in automated face recognition and demographic attribute estimation algorithms, where errors are lower on certain cohorts belonging to specific demographic groups. We present a novel de-biasing adversarial network (DebFace) that learns to extract disentangled feature representations for both unbiased face recognition and demographics estimation. The proposed network consists of one identity classifier and three demographic classifiers (for gender, age, and race) that are trained to distinguish identity and demographic attributes, respectively. Adversarial learning…
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…
Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学学院公园分校）
Face recognition networks encode information about sensitive attributes while being trained for identity classification. Such encoding has two major issues: (a) it makes the face representations susceptible to privacy leakage (b) it appears to contribute to bias in face recognition. However, existing bias mitigation approaches generally require end-to-end training and are unable to achieve high verification accuracy. Therefore, we present a descriptor-based adversarial de-biasing approach called `Protected Attribute Suppression System (PASS)'. PASS can be trained on top of descriptors obtained…
Deep learning models have shown their vulnerability when dealing with adversarial attacks. Existing attacks almost perform on low-level instances, such as pixels and super-pixels, and rarely exploit semantic clues. For face recognition attacks, existing methods typically generate the l_p-norm perturbations on pixels, however, resulting in low attack transferability and high vulnerability to denoising defense models. In this work, instead of performing perturbations on the low-level pixels, we propose to generate attacks through perturbing on the high-level semantics to improve attack transfera…
Predicting facial attributes from faces in the wild is very challenging due to pose and lighting variations in the real world. The key to this problem is to build proper feature representations to cope with these unfavourable conditions. Given the success of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) in image classification, the high-level CNN feature, as an intuitive and reasonable choice, has been widely utilized for this problem. In this paper, however, we consider the mid-level CNN features as an alternative to the high-level ones for attribute prediction. This is based on the observation that fac…
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…
Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD（弗劳恩霍夫计算机图形学研究所IGD）；Technical University of Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）
Deeply-learned face representations enable the success of current face recognition systems. Despite the ability of these representations to encode the identity of an individual, recent works have shown that more information is stored within, such as demographics, image characteristics, and social traits. This threatens the user's privacy, since for many applications these templates are expected to be solely used for recognition purposes. Knowing the encoded information in face templates helps to develop bias-mitigating and privacy-preserving face recognition technologies. This work aims to sup…
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Center for Research on Intelligent Perception and Computing（智能感知与计算研究中心）；Tianjin Academy for Intelligent Recognition Technologies（天津智能识别技术研究院）
Face anti-spoofing is the key to preventing security breaches in biometric recognition applications. Existing software-based and hardware-based face liveness detection methods are effective in constrained environments or designated datasets only. Deep learning method using RGB and infrared images demands a large amount of training data for new attacks. In this paper, we present a face anti-spoofing method in a real-world scenario by automatic learning the physical characteristics in polarization images of a real face compared to a deceptive attack. A computational framework is developed to ext…
This paper focuses on improving face recognition performance with a new signature combining implicit facial features with explicit soft facial attributes. This signature has two components: the existing patch-based features and the soft facial attributes. A deep convolutional neural network adapted from state-of-the-art networks is used to learn the soft facial attributes. Then, a signature matcher is introduced that merges the contributions of both patch-based features and the facial attributes. In this matcher, the matching scores computed from patch-based features and the facial attributes …
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…
In this paper, we propose a novel explanatory framework aimed to provide a better understanding of how face recognition models perform as the underlying data characteristics (protected attributes: gender, ethnicity, age; non-protected attributes: facial hair, makeup, accessories, face orientation and occlusion, image distortion, emotions) on which they are tested change. With our framework, we evaluate ten state-of-the-art face recognition models, comparing their fairness in terms of security and usability on two data sets, involving six groups based on gender and ethnicity. We then analyze th…
This paper presents a new proposal of an efficient computational model of face recognition which uses cues from the distributed face recognition mechanism of the brain, and by gathering engineering equivalent of these cues from existing literature. Three distinct and widely used features: Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG), Local Binary Patterns (LBP), and Principal components (PCs) extracted from target images are used in a manner which is simple, and yet effective. The HOG and LBP features further undergo principal component analysis for dimensionality reduction. Our model uses multi-laye…
On the Illusion of Gender Bias in Face Recognition: Explaining the Fairness Issue Through Non-demographic Attributes
Paderborn University（帕德博恩大学）；Technical University of Darmstadt（达姆施塔特技术大学）；University of Notre Dame（诺特丹大学）；Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz（美因茨约翰· Gutenberg大学）
Images taken from the Internet have been used alongside Deep Learning for many different tasks such as: smile detection, ethnicity, hair style, hair colour, gender and age prediction. After witnessing these usages, we were wondering what other attributes can be predicted from facial images available on the Internet. In this paper we tackle the prediction of physical attributes from face images using Convolutional Neural Networks trained on our dataset named FIRW. We crawled around 61, 000 images from the web, then use face detection to crop faces from these real world images. We choose ResNet-…
University of Oulu（奥卢大学）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）；Institute of Computing Technology, CAS（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学）
Face anti-spoofing (FAS) plays a vital role in securing the face recognition systems from presentation attacks. Most existing FAS methods capture various cues (e.g., texture, depth and reflection) to distinguish the live faces from the spoofing faces. All these cues are based on the discrepancy among physical materials (e.g., skin, glass, paper and silicone). In this paper we rephrase face anti-spoofing as a material recognition problem and combine it with classical human material perception [1], intending to extract discriminative and robust features for FAS. To this end, we propose the Bilat…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Zagazig University（扎加齐格大学）
Face recognition is known to be vulnerable to adversarial face images. Existing works craft face adversarial images by indiscriminately changing a single attribute without being aware of the intrinsic attributes of the images. To this end, we propose a new Semantic Adversarial Attack called SAA-StarGAN that tampers with the significant facial attributes for each image. We predict the most significant attributes by applying the cosine similarity or probability score. The probability score method is based on training a Face Verification model for an attribute prediction task to obtain a class pr…
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学网络空间安全学院）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；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）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）
Heterogeneous Face Recognition (HFR) aims to match faces across different domains (e.g., visible to near-infrared images), which has been widely applied in authentication and forensics scenarios. However, HFR is a challenging problem because of the large cross-domain discrepancy, limited heterogeneous data pairs, and large variation of facial attributes. To address these challenges, we propose a new HFR method from the perspective of heterogeneous data augmentation, named Face Synthesis with Identity-Attribute Disentanglement (FSIAD). Firstly, the identity-attribute disentanglement (IAD) decou…
Michigan State University（密歇根州立大学）；University of Wisconsin – Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校）
Recent research has established the possibility of deducing soft-biometric attributes such as age, gender and race from an individual's face image with high accuracy. However, this raises privacy concerns, especially when face images collected for biometric recognition purposes are used for attribute analysis without the person's consent. To address this problem, we develop a technique for imparting soft biometric privacy to face images via an image perturbation methodology. The image perturbation is undertaken using a GAN-based Semi-Adversarial Network (SAN) - referred to as PrivacyNet - that…
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Tongji University（同济大学）；University of Warwick（华威大学）；University of Virginia（弗吉尼亚大学）
Facial recognition is a key enabling component for emerging Internet of Things (IoT) services such as smart homes or responsive offices. Through the use of deep neural networks, facial recognition has achieved excellent performance. However, this is only possibly when trained with hundreds of images of each user in different viewing and lighting conditions. Clearly, this level of effort in enrolment and labelling is impossible for wide-spread deployment and adoption. Inspired by the fact that most people carry smart wireless devices with them, e.g. smartphones, we propose to use this wireless …
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 …
Attributes Shape the Embedding Space of Face Recognition Models
Department of Mathematical Sciences, Politecnico di Torino, Turin, Italy（波兰理工学院数学科学系）；Department of Computer Science, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy（比萨大学计算机科学系）；CENTAI Institute, Turin, Italy（CENTAI研究院）
Recent work reports disparate performance for intersectional racial groups across face recognition tasks: face verification and identification. However, the definition of those racial groups has a significant impact on the underlying findings of such racial bias analysis. Previous studies define these groups based on either demographic information (e.g. African, Asian etc.) or skin tone (e.g. lighter or darker skins). The use of such sensitive or broad group definitions has disadvantages for bias investigation and subsequent counter-bias solutions design. By contrast, this study introduces an …
Although previous CNN based face anti-spoofing methods have achieved promising performance under intra-dataset testing, they suffer from poor generalization under cross-dataset testing. The main reason is that they learn the network with only binary supervision, which may learn arbitrary cues overfitting on the training dataset. To make the learned feature explainable and more generalizable, some researchers introduce facial depth and reflection map as the auxiliary supervision. However, many other generalizable cues are unexplored for face anti-spoofing, which limits their performance under c…
Learning to Discover Forgery Cues for Face Forgery Detection
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学网络空间安全学院）；RealAI Inc（RealAI公司）
UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Facebook AI Research（Facebook人工智能研究院）
We explore the task of recognizing peoples' identities in photo albums in an unconstrained setting. To facilitate this, we introduce the new People In Photo Albums (PIPA) dataset, consisting of over 60000 instances of 2000 individuals collected from public Flickr photo albums. With only about half of the person images containing a frontal face, the recognition task is very challenging due to the large variations in pose, clothing, camera viewpoint, image resolution and illumination. We propose the Pose Invariant PErson Recognition (PIPER) method, which accumulates the cues of poselet-level per…
Many existing face anti-spoofing (FAS) methods focus on modeling the decision boundaries for some predefined spoof types. However, the diversity of the spoof samples including the unknown ones hinders the effective decision boundary modeling and leads to weak generalization capability. In this paper, we reformulate FAS in an anomaly detection perspective and propose a residual-learning framework to learn the discriminative live-spoof differences which are defined as the spoof cues. The proposed framework consists of a spoof cue generator and an auxiliary classifier. The generator minimizes the…
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Chongqing Institute of Public Security Science and Technology（重庆市公安科学技术研究院）
Spatio-temporal information is very important to capture the discriminative cues between genuine and fake faces from video sequences. To explore such a temporal feature, the fine-grained motions (e.g., eye blinking, mouth movements and head swing) across video frames are very critical. In this paper, we propose a joint CNN-LSTM network for face anti-spoofing, focusing on the motion cues across video frames. We first extract the high discriminative features of video frames using the conventional Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Then we leverage Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) with the extracte…
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）
This paper focuses on the problem of generating human face pictures from specific attributes. The existing CNN-based face generation models, however, either ignore the identity of the generated face or fail to preserve the identity of the reference face image. Here we address this problem from the view of optimization, and suggest an optimization model to generate human face with the given attributes while keeping the identity of the reference image. The attributes can be obtained from the attribute-guided image or by tuning the attribute features of the reference image. With the deep convolut…
Facial attribute analysis in the real world scenario is very challenging mainly because of complex face variations. Existing works of analyzing face attributes are mostly based on the cropped and aligned face images. However, this result in the capability of attribute prediction heavily relies on the preprocessing of face detector. To address this problem, we present a novel jointly learned deep architecture for both facial attribute analysis and face detection. Our framework can process the natural images in the wild and our experiments on CelebA and LFWA datasets clearly show that the state-…
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Recent studies have shown remarkable success in face image generations. However, most of the existing methods only generate face images from random noise, and cannot generate face images according to the specific attributes. In this paper, we focus on the problem of face synthesis from attributes, which aims at generating faces with specific characteristics corresponding to the given attributes. To this end, we propose a novel attributes aware face image generator method with generative adversarial networks called AFGAN. Specifically, we firstly propose a two-path embedding layer and self-atte…
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…
Face attribute evaluation plays an important role in video surveillance and face analysis. Although methods based on convolution neural networks have made great progress, they inevitably only deal with one local neighborhood with convolutions at a time. Besides, existing methods mostly regard face attribute evaluation as the individual multi-label classification task, ignoring the inherent relationship between semantic attributes and face identity information. In this paper, we propose a novel \textbf{trans}former-based representation for \textbf{f}ace \textbf{a}ttribute evaluation method (\te…
Predicting face attributes in the wild is challenging due to complex face variations. We propose a novel deep learning framework for attribute prediction in the wild. It cascades two CNNs, LNet and ANet, which are fine-tuned jointly with attribute tags, but pre-trained differently. LNet is pre-trained by massive general object categories for face localization, while ANet is pre-trained by massive face identities for attribute prediction. This framework not only outperforms the state-of-the-art with a large margin, but also reveals valuable facts on learning face representation. (1) It shows ho…
State-of-the-art methods of attribute detection from faces almost always assume the presence of a full, unoccluded face. Hence, their performance degrades for partially visible and occluded faces. In this paper, we introduce SPLITFACE, a deep convolutional neural network-based method that is explicitly designed to perform attribute detection in partially occluded faces. Taking several facial segments and the full face as input, the proposed method takes a data driven approach to determine which attributes are localized in which facial segments. The unique architecture of the network allows eac…
