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）
Dana A Abdullah, Dana Rasul Hamad, Ismail Y. Maolood, Hakem Beitollahi, Aso K. Ameen, Sirwan A. Aula, Abdulhady Abas Abdulla, Mohammed Y. Shakorf, Sabat Salih Muhamad
在安全、门禁控制和公共安全领域，识别同一人戴与不戴口罩的面孔对于确保身份识别的一致性至关重要。这一能力在执法、医疗和监控等场景中尤为关键，在这些场景中，尽管存在面部遮挡，仍必须保持准确识别。本研究聚焦于通过采用余弦相似度作为主要技术，来识别同一人戴与不戴口罩面孔的挑战。随着口罩使用量的增加，传统人脸识别系统面临显著的准确性难题，因此开发能够在口罩条件下可靠识别个体的方法变得至关重要。为此，本研究提出了口罩-非口罩人脸匹配模型（Masked-Unmasked Face Matching Model, MUFM）。该模型利用视觉几何组（Visual Geometry Group, VGG16）模型进行迁移学习，以提取显著的面部特征，随后使用K近邻（K-Nearest Neighbors, K-NN）算法对特征进行分类。采用余弦相似度度量来比较同一人的口罩与非口罩面孔。该方法是一项新颖贡献，因为此前尚未有研究利用余弦相似度来识别同一人戴与不戴口罩的任务。通过整合这些先进方法，本研究展示了在存在口罩的情况下仍能有效识别个体，解决了传统系统的一个重大局限。数据使用是本工作的另一关键部分，通过从三个不同来源收集并准备图像数据集，尤其是其中部分数据为真实数据，为本研究提供了全面的支撑。所用图像数据集已包含在三个不同的数据集中，涵盖同一面孔的口罩与非口罩图像。
英文摘要：
Recognizing the same faces with and without masks is important for ensuring consistent identification in security, access control, and public safety. This capability is crucial in scenarios like law enforcement, healthcare, and surveillance, where accurate recognition must be maintained despite facial occlusion. This research focuses on the challenge of recognizing the same faces with and without masks by employing cosine similarity as the primary technique. With the increased use of masks, traditional facial recognition systems face significant accuracy issues, making it crucial to develop methods that can reliably identify individuals in masked conditions. For that reason, this study proposed Masked-Unmasked Face Matching Model (MUFM). This model employs transfer learning using the Visual Geometry Group (VGG16) model to extract significant facial features, which are subsequently classified utilizing the K-Nearest Neighbors (K-NN) algorithm. The cosine similarity metric is employed to compare masked and unmasked faces of the same individuals. This approach represents a novel contribution, as the task of recognizing the same individual with and without a mask using cosine similarity has not been previously addressed. By integrating these advanced methodologies, the research demonstrates effective identification of individuals despite the presence of masks, addressing a significant limitation in traditional systems. Using data is another essential part of this work, by collecting and preparing an image dataset from three different sources especially some of those data are real provided a comprehensive power of this research. The image dataset used were already collected in three different datasets of masked and unmasked for the same faces.
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 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…
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…
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…
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…
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 …
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…
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）
Facial recognition is fundamental for a wide variety of security systems operating in real-time applications. In video surveillance based face recognition, face images are typically captured over multiple frames in uncontrolled conditions; where head pose, illumination, shadowing, motion blur and focus change over the sequence. We can generalize that the three fundamental operations involved in the facial recognition tasks: face detection, face alignment and face recognition. This study presents comparative benchmark tables for the state-of-art face recognition methods by testing them with sam…
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…
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 …
PLGSA-Transformer: Periocular Landmark-Guided Attention with Occlusion-Adaptive Cosine Thresholding for Cross-Modal Masked and Unmasked Face Recognition
Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science, Qaiwan International University（工程与计算机科学学院，卡伊万国际大学）；Department of Information and Communication Technology Center (ICTC)-System Information, Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research（信息与通信技术中心（ICTC）-系统信息，高等教育与科学研究部）
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 …
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；XForwardAI；Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院）；InsightFace
According to WHO statistics, there are more than 204,617,027 confirmed COVID-19 cases including 4,323,247 deaths worldwide till August 12, 2021. During the coronavirus epidemic, almost everyone wears a facial mask. Traditionally, face recognition approaches process mostly non-occluded faces, which include primary facial features such as the eyes, nose, and mouth. Removing the mask for authentication in airports or laboratories will increase the risk of virus infection, posing a huge challenge to current face recognition systems. Due to the sudden outbreak of the epidemic, there are yet no publ…
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 p…
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, wearing face masks has become a mandate in public places worldwide. Face masks occlude a significant portion of the facial region. Additionally, people wear different types of masks, from simple ones to ones with graphics and prints. These pose new challenges to face recognition algorithms. Researchers have recently proposed a few masked face datasets for designing algorithms to overcome the challenges of masked face recognition. However, existing datasets lack the cultural diversity and collection in the unrestricted settings. Country like India with attire diver…
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）
Noisy label Facial Expression Recognition (FER) is more challenging than traditional noisy label classification tasks due to the inter-class similarity and the annotation ambiguity. Recent works mainly tackle this problem by filtering out large-loss samples. In this paper, we explore dealing with noisy labels from a new feature-learning perspective. We find that FER models remember noisy samples by focusing on a part of the features that can be considered related to the noisy labels instead of learning from the whole features that lead to the latent truth. Inspired by that, we propose a novel …
The performance of face recognition systems can be negatively impacted in the presence of masks and other types of facial coverings that have become prevalent due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In such cases, the periocular region of the human face becomes an important biometric cue. In this article, we present a detailed review of periocular biometrics. We first examine the various face and periocular techniques specially designed to recognize humans wearing a face mask. Then, we review different aspects of periocular biometrics: (a) the anatomical cues present in the periocular region useful for …
PriorProbe: Recovering Individual-Level Priors for Personalizing Neural Networks in Facial Expression Recognition
Department of Psychology, University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom（心理学系，沃里克大学，科文特，英国）；Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom（沃里克商学院，沃里克大学，科文特，英国）
Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD（弗劳恩霍夫计算机图形研究所）；TU Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）
Wearing a mask has proven to be one of the most effective ways to prevent the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. However, wearing a mask poses challenges for different face recognition tasks and raises concerns about the performance of masked face presentation detection (PAD). The main issues facing the mask face PAD are the wrongly classified bona fide masked faces and the wrongly classified partial attacks (covered by real masks). This work addresses these issues by proposing a method that considers partial attack labels to supervise the PAD model training, as well as regional weighted …
Fairness has become increasingly pivotal in facial recognition. Without bias mitigation, deploying unfair AI would harm the interest of the underprivileged population. In this paper, we observe that though the higher accuracy that features from the deeper layer of a neural networks generally offer, fairness conditions deteriorate as we extract features from deeper layers. This phenomenon motivates us to extend the concept of multi-exit framework. Unlike existing works mainly focusing on accuracy, our multi-exit framework is fairness-oriented, where the internal classifiers are trained to be mo…
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…
Indian Institute of Science（印度科学学院）；National Institute of Technology（国家技术学院）
Facial recognition has always been a challeng- ing task for computer vision scientists and experts. Despite complexities arising due to variations in camera parameters, illumination and face orientations, significant progress has been made in the field with deep learning algorithms now competing with human-level accuracy. But in contrast to the recent advances in face recognition techniques, Disguised Facial Identification continues to be a tougher challenge in the field of computer vision. The modern day scenario, where security is of prime concern, regular face identification techniques do n…
Jawaharlal Nehru University（贾瓦哈拉尔·尼赫鲁大学）；Indian Institute of Technology Delhi（印度理工学院德里分校）
Predicting attributes in the landmark free facial images is itself a challenging task which gets further complicated when the face gets occluded due to the usage of masks. Smart access control gates which utilize identity verification or the secure login to personal electronic gadgets may utilize face as a biometric trait. Particularly, the Covid-19 pandemic increasingly validates the essentiality of hygienic and contactless identity verification. In such cases, the usage of masks become more inevitable and performing attribute prediction helps in segregating the target vulnerable groups from …
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；Seeing Machines Ltd.（Seeing Machines 有限公司）
Recently, technologies such as face detection, facial landmark localisation and face recognition and verification have matured enough to provide effective and efficient solutions for imagery captured under arbitrary conditions (referred to as "in-the-wild"). This is partially attributed to the fact that comprehensive "in-the-wild" benchmarks have been developed for face detection, landmark localisation and recognition/verification. A very important technology that has not been thoroughly evaluated yet is deformable face tracking "in-the-wild". Until now, the performance has mainly been assesse…
College of Computer Science, Zhejiang University（浙江大学计算机学院）
Different from many other attributes, facial expression can change in a continuous way, and therefore, a slight semantic change of input should also lead to the output fluctuation limited in a small scale. This consistency is important. However, current Facial Expression Recognition (FER) datasets may have the extreme imbalance problem, as well as the lack of data and the excessive amounts of noise, hindering this consistency and leading to a performance decreasing when testing. In this paper, we not only consider the prediction accuracy on sample points, but also take the neighborhood smoothn…
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…
Video Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures for Facial Expression Recognition
Chair for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence（人中心人工智能教研室）；University of Augsburg（奥斯特拉赫大学）；Faculty of Computer Science（计算机科学学院）；Technical University of Applied Sciences Augsburg（应用科学大学奥斯特拉赫）
SVFAP: Self-supervised Video Facial Affect Perceiver
School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
State University of New York at Binghamton（纽约州立大学宾汉姆顿分校）；Rice University（莱斯大学）
Visual attention has been extensively studied for learning fine-grained features in both facial expression recognition (FER) and Action Unit (AU) detection. A broad range of previous research has explored how to use attention modules to localize detailed facial parts (e,g. facial action units), learn discriminative features, and learn inter-class correlation. However, few related works pay attention to the robustness of the attention module itself. Through experiments, we found neural attention maps initialized with different feature maps yield diverse representations when learning to attend t…
Academy for Engineering & Technology, Fudan University（复旦大学工程与技术学院）；School of Computer Science, Fudan University（复旦大学计算机科学技术学院）；Yiwu Research Institute, Fudan University（复旦大学义乌研究院）
École de technologie supérieure（高等技术学院）；Concordia University（康考迪亚大学）
Training deep learning models for accurate spatiotemporal recognition of facial expressions in videos requires significant computational resources. For practical reasons, 3D Convolutional Neural Networks (3D CNNs) are usually trained with relatively short clips randomly extracted from videos. However, such uniform sampling is generally sub-optimal because equal importance is assigned to each temporal clip. In this paper, we present a strategy for efficient video-based training of 3D CNNs. It relies on softmax temporal pooling and a weighted sampling mechanism to select the most relevant traini…
Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) continues to pose a great challenge to the world since its outbreak. To fight against the disease, a series of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques are developed and applied to real-world scenarios such as safety monitoring, disease diagnosis, infection risk assessment, lesion segmentation of COVID-19 CT scans,etc. The coronavirus epidemics have forced people wear masks to counteract the transmission of virus, which also brings difficulties to monitor large groups of people wearing masks. In this paper, we primarily focus on the AI techniques of masked fa…
University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
Facial action units (FAUs) are critical for fine-grained facial expression analysis. Although FAU detection has been actively studied using ideally high quality images, it was not thoroughly studied under heavily occluded conditions. In this paper, we propose the first occlusion-robust FAU recognition method to maintain FAU detection performance under heavy occlusions. Our novel approach takes advantage of rich information from the latent space of masked autoencoder (MAE) and transforms it into FAU features. Bypassing the occlusion reconstruction step, our model efficiently extracts FAU featur…
We propose an end-to-end architecture for facial expression recognition. Our model learns an optimal tree topology for facial landmarks, whose traversal generates a sequence from which we obtain an embedding to feed a sequential learner. The proposed architecture incorporates two main streams, one focusing on landmark positions to learn the structure of the face, while the other focuses on patches around the landmarks to learn texture information. Each stream is followed by an attention mechanism and the outputs are fed to a two-stream fusion component to perform the final classification. We c…
Lanzhou University（兰州大学）；University of Guelph（圭尔夫大学）；Zhejiang Sci-Tech University（浙江理工大学）；Chongqing University（重庆大学）
The ever-increasing demands for intuitive interactions in Virtual Reality has triggered a boom in the realm of Facial Expression Recognition (FER). To address the limitations in existing approaches (e.g., narrow receptive fields and homogenous supervisory signals) and further cement the capacity of FER tools, a novel multifarious supervision-steering Transformer for FER in the wild is proposed in this paper. Referred as FER-former, our approach features multi-granularity embedding integration, hybrid self-attention scheme, and heterogeneous domain-steering supervision. In specific, to dig deep…
Institute of High Performance Computing, Agency for Science, Technology, and Research（高性能计算研究所，科技研究局）；Centre for Artificial Intelligence, University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学人工智能中心）；Pattern Recognition and Intelligent System Laboratory, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学模式识别与智能系统实验室）；Brookhaven National Laboratory（布鲁克海文国家实验室）；InnoPeak Technology Inc.；Key Laboratory of Medical Molecular Virology, School of Basic Medical Sciences, Fudan University（复旦大学基础医学院医学分子病毒学重点实验室）
In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective approach, named Point Adversarial Self Mining (PASM), to improve the recognition accuracy in facial expression recognition. Unlike previous works focusing on designing specific architectures or loss functions to solve this problem, PASM boosts the network capability by simulating human learning processes: providing updated learning materials and guidance from more capable teachers. Specifically, to generate new learning materials, PASM leverages a point adversarial attack method and a trained teacher network to locate the most informative positi…
