Static and dynamic 3D facial expression recognition: A comprehensive survey

Automatic facial expression recognition constitutes an active research field due to the latest advances in computing technology that make the user's experience a clear priority. The majority of work conducted in this area involves 2D imagery, despite the problems this presents due to inherent pose and illumination variations. In order to deal with these problems, 3D and 4D (dynamic 3D) recordings are increasingly used in expression analysis research. In this paper we survey the recent advances in 3D and 4D facial expression recognition. We discuss developments in 3D facial data acquisition and tracking, and present currently available 3D/4D face databases suitable for 3D/4D facial expressions analysis as well as the existing facial expression recognition systems that exploit either 3D or 4D data in detail. Finally, challenges that have to be addressed if 3D facial expression recognition systems are to become a part of future applications are extensively discussed.     

Real-time 3D face tracking based on active appearance model constrained by depth data

Active Appearance Model (AAM) is an algorithm for fitting a generative model of object shape and appearance to an input image. AAM allows accurate, real-time tracking of human faces in 2D and can be extended to track faces in 3D by constraining its fitting with a linear 3D morphable model. Unfortunately, this AAM-based 3D tracking does not provide adequate accuracy and robustness, as we show in this paper. We introduce a new constraint into AAM fitting that uses depth data from a commodity RGBD camera (Kinect). This addition significantly reduces 3D tracking errors. We also describe how to initialize the 3D morphable face model used in our tracking algorithm by computing its face shape parameters of the user from a batch of tracked frames. The described face tracking algorithm is used in Microsoft's Kinect system.     

一种鲁棒高效的人脸特征点跟踪方法

人脸特征点跟踪能获取除粗略的人脸位置和运动轨迹以外的人脸部件的精确信息,对计算机视觉研究有重要作用.主动表象模型(Active appearance model, AAM)是描述人脸特征点位置的最有效的方法之一,但是其高维参数空间和梯度下降优化策略使得AAM对初始参数敏感,且易陷入局部极值. 因此,基于传统AAM的人脸特征点跟踪方法不能同时较好地解决大姿态、光照和表情的问题.本文在多视角AAM的框架下,提出一种结合随机森林和线性判别分析(Linear discriminate analysis, LDA)的实时姿态估计算法对跟踪的人脸进行姿态预估计和更新,从而有效地解决了视频人脸大姿态变化的问题.提出了一种改进的在线表象模型(Online appearance model, OAM)方法来评估跟踪的准确性,并自适应地通过增量主成分分析(Principle component analysis, PCA) 学习来更新AAM的纹理模型,极大地提高了跟踪的稳定性和模型应对光照和表情变化的能力.实验结果表明,本文算法在视频人脸特征点跟踪的准确性、鲁棒性和实时性方面都有良好的性能.     

2D representation of facial surfaces for multi-pose 3D face recognition

The increasing availability of 3D facial data offers the potential to overcome the intrinsic difficulties faced by conventional face recognition using 2D images. Instead of extending 2D recognition algorithms for 3D purpose, this letter proposes a novel strategy for 3D face recognition from the perspective of representing each 3D facial surface with a 2D attribute image and taking the advantage of the advances in 2D face recognition. In our approach, each 3D facial surface is mapped homeomorphically onto a 2D lattice, where the value at each site is an attribute that represents the local 3D geometrical or textural properties on the surface, therefore invariant to pose changes. This lattice is then interpolated to generate a 2D attribute image. 3D face recognition can be achieved by applying the traditional 2D face recognition techniques to obtained attribute images. In this study, we chose the pose invariant local mean curvature calculated at each vertex on the 3D facial surface to construct the 2D attribute image and adopted the eigenface algorithm for attribute image recognition. We compared our approach to state-of-the-art 3D face recognition algorithms in the FRGC (Version 2.0), GavabDB and NPU3D database. Our results show that the proposed approach has improved the robustness to head pose variation and can produce more accurate 3D multi-pose face recognition.     

2D face fitting-assisted 3D face reconstruction for pose-robust face recognition

Recent face recognition algorithm can achieve high accuracy when the tested face samples are frontal. However, when the face pose changes largely, the performance of existing methods drop drastically. Efforts on pose-robust face recognition are highly desirable, especially when each face class has only one frontal training sample. In this study, we propose a 2D face fitting-assisted 3D face reconstruction algorithm that aims at recognizing faces of different poses when each face class has only one frontal training sample. For each frontal training sample, a 3D face is reconstructed by optimizing the parameters of 3D morphable model (3DMM). By rotating the reconstructed 3D face to different views, pose virtual face images are generated to enlarge the training set of face recognition. Different from the conventional 3D face reconstruction methods, the proposed algorithm utilizes automatic 2D face fitting to assist 3D face reconstruction. We automatically locate 88 sparse points of the frontal face by 2D face-fitting algorithm. Such 2D face-fitting algorithm is so-called Random Forest Embedded Active Shape Model, which embeds random forest learning into the framework of Active Shape Model. Results of 2D face fitting are added to the 3D face reconstruction objective function as shape constraints. The optimization objective energy function takes not only image intensity, but also 2D fitting results into account. Shape and texture parameters of 3DMM are thus estimated by fitting the 3DMM to the 2D frontal face sample, which is a non-linear optimization problem. We experiment the proposed method on the publicly available CMUPIE database, which includes faces viewed from 11 different poses, and the results show that the proposed method is effective and the face recognition results toward pose variants are promising.     

姿态和表情变化下的三维人脸标志点定位

三维人脸标志点定位在人脸识别、人脸跟踪、人脸建模、表情分析等方面具有非常重要的作用. 然而, 在姿态和表情变化很大的条件下进行标志点定位, 这仍然是一个很具挑战性的课题. 本文提出一种对姿态和表情不敏感的三维人脸标志点定位方法, 利用HK曲率分析检测出候选标志点, 根据对面部形状的先验知识, 提出一种基于人脸几何结构的分类策略对候选标志点进一步细分, 通过把候选标志点与人脸标志点模型进行匹配, 实现标志点的精确定位. 首先在CASIA数据集对该方法的标志点定位精度进行测试, 然后在UND/FRGC v2.0数据集对该方法与其他方法进行比较. 实验结果表明该方法在姿态和表情变化很大的条件下具有高精度和高鲁棒性.     

Efficient 3D reconstruction for face recognition

Face recognition with variant pose, illumination and expression (PIE) is a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose an analysis-by-synthesis framework for face recognition with variant PIE. First, an efficient two-dimensional (2D)-to-three-dimensional (3D) integrated face reconstruction approach is introduced to reconstruct a personalized 3D face model from a single frontal face image with neutral expression and normal illumination. Then, realistic virtual faces with different PIE are synthesized based on the personalized 3D face to characterize the face subspace. Finally, face recognition is conducted based on these representative virtual faces. Compared with other related work, this framework has following advantages: (1) only one single frontal face is required for face recognition, which avoids the burdensome enrollment work; (2) the synthesized face samples provide the capability to conduct recognition under difficult conditions like complex PIE; and (3) compared with other 3D reconstruction approaches, our proposed 2D-to-3D integrated face reconstruction approach is fully automatic and more efficient. The extensive experimental results show that the synthesized virtual faces significantly improve the accuracy of face recognition with changing PIE.     

Pose robust face tracking by combining view-based AAMs and temporal filters

Active appearance models (AAMs) are useful for face tracking for the advantages of detailed face interpretation, accurate alignment and high efficiency. However, they are sensitive to initial parameters and may easily be stuck in local minima due to the gradient-descent optimization, which makes the AAM based face tracker unstable in the presence of large pose deviation and fast motion. In this paper, we propose to combine the view-based AAMs with two novel temporal filters to overcome the limitations. First, we build a new view space based on the shape parameters of AAMs, instead of the model parameters controlling both the shape and appearance, for the purpose of pose estimation. Then the Kalman filter is used to simultaneously update the pose and shape parameters for a better fitting of each frame. Second, we propose a temporal matching filter which is twofold. The inter-frame local appearance constraint is incorporated into AAM fitting, where the mechanism of the active shape model (ASM) is also implemented in a unified framework to find more accurate matching points. Moreover, we propose to initialize the shape with correspondences found by a random forest based local feature matching. By introducing the local information and temporal correspondences, the twofold temporal matching filter improves the tracking stability when confronted with fast appearance changes. Experimental results show that our algorithm is more pose robust than basic AAMs and some state-of-art AAM based methods, and that it can also handle large expressions and non-extreme illumination changes in test video sequences.     

Efficient 3D face recognition handling facial expression and hair occlusion

This paper presents an efficient 3D face recognition method to handle facial expression and hair occlusion. The proposed method uses facial curves to form a rejection classifier and produce a facial deformation mapping and then adaptively selects regions for matching. When a new 3D face with an arbitrary pose and expression is queried, the pose is normalized based on the automatically detected nose tip and the principal component analysis (PCA) follows. Then, the facial curve in the nose region is extracted and used to form the rejection classifier which quickly eliminates dissimilar faces in the gallery for efficient recognition. Next, six facial regions which cover the face are segmented and curves in these regions are used to map facial deformation. Regions used for matching are automatically selected based on the deformation mapping. In the end, results of all the matching engines are fused by weighted sum rule. The approach is applied on the FRGC v2.0 dataset and a verification rate of 96.0% for ROC III is achieved as a false acceptance rate (FAR) of 0.1%. In the identification scenario, a rank-one accuracy of 97.8% is achieved.     

Matching 2.5D face scans to 3D models

The performance of face recognition systems that use two-dimensional images depends on factors such as lighting and subject's pose. We are developing a face recognition system that utilizes three-dimensional shape information to make the system more robust to arbitrary pose and lighting. For each subject, a 3D face model is constructed by integrating several 2.5D face scans which are captured from different views. 2.5D is a simplified 3D (x,y,z) surface representation that contains at most one depth value (z direction) for every point in the (x, y) plane. Two different modalities provided by the facial scan, namely, shape and texture, are utilized and integrated for face matching. The recognition engine consists of two components, surface matching and appearance-based matching. The surface matching component is based on a modified iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm. The candidate list from the gallery used for appearance matching is dynamically generated based on the output of the surface matching component, which reduces the complexity of the appearance-based matching stage. Three-dimensional models in the gallery are used to synthesize new appearance samples with pose and illumination variations and the synthesized face images are used in discriminant subspace analysis. The weighted sum rule is applied to combine the scores given by the two matching components. Experimental results are given for matching a database of 200 3D face models with 598 2.5D independent test scans acquired under different pose and some lighting and expression changes. These results show the feasibility of the proposed matching scheme.     

Annotated face model-based alignment: a robust landmark-free pose estimation approach for 3D model registration

Registering a 3D facial model onto a 2D image is important for constructing pixel-wise correspondences between different facial images. The registration is based on a 3 \(\times \) 4 dimensional projection matrix, which is obtained from pose estimation. Conventional pose estimation approaches employ facial landmarks to determine the coefficients inside the projection matrix and are sensitive to missing or incorrect landmarks. In this paper, a landmark-free pose estimation method is presented. The method can be used to estimate the matrix when facial landmarks are not available. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms several landmark-free pose estimation methods and achieves competitive accuracy in terms of estimating pose parameters. The method is also demonstrated to be effective as part of a 3D-aided face recognition pipeline (UR2D), whose rank-1 identification rate is competitive to the methods that use landmarks to estimate head pose.     

对表情鲁棒的面部轮廓线3维人脸识别

目的表情变化是3维人脸识别面临的主要问题。为克服表情影响,提出了一种基于面部轮廓线对表情鲁棒的3维人脸识别方法。方法首先,对人脸进行预处理,包括人脸区域切割、平滑处理和姿态归一化,将所有的人脸置于姿态坐标系下;然后,从3维人脸模型的半刚性区域提取人脸多条垂直方向的轮廓线来表征人脸面部曲面;最后,利用弹性曲线匹配算法计算不同3维人脸模型间对应的轮廓线在预形状空间(preshape space)中的测地距离,将其作为相似性度量,并且对所有轮廓线的相似度向量加权融合,得到总相似度用于分类。结果在FRGC v2.0数据库上进行识别实验,获得97.1%的Rank-1识别率。结论基于面部轮廓线的3维人脸识别方法,通过从人脸的半刚性区域提取多条面部轮廓线来表征人脸,在一定程度上削弱了表情的影响,同时还提高了人脸匹配速度。实验结果表明,该方法具有较强的识别性能,并且对表情变化具有较好的鲁棒性。     

3D通用人脸模型的自适应算法及应用

利用3D人脸建模的方法进行人脸识别有效地克服了2D人脸识别系统中识别率易受光照、姿态、表情影响的缺陷。文章采用一种依据人脸图像对3D通用人脸模型进行自适应调整的有效算法,构造出特定的人脸模型并运用于人脸识别中。通过比较从人脸图像中估算出的特征点与通用人脸模型在图像平面上的投影点之间的关系,对3D通用人脸模型进行全局和局部调整,以适应人脸中眼、口、鼻的个性化特征。最后以一个实例说明了此算法的应用。     

3D/4D facial expression analysis: An advanced annotated face model approach

Facial expression analysis has interested many researchers in the past decade due to its potential applications in various fields such as human–computer interaction, psychological studies, and facial animation. Three-dimensional facial data has been proven to be insensitive to illumination condition and head pose, and has hence gathered attention in recent years. In this paper, we focus on discrete expression classification using 3D data from the human face. The paper is divided in two parts. In the first part, we present improvement to the fitting of the Annotated Face Model (AFM) so that a dense point correspondence can be found in terms of both position and semantics among static 3D face scans or frames in 3D face sequences. Then, an expression recognition framework on static 3D images is presented. It is based on a Point Distribution Model (PDM) which can be built on different features. In the second part of this article, a systematic pipeline that operates on dynamic 3D sequences (4D datasets or 3D videos) is proposed and alternative modules are investigated as a comparative study. We evaluated both 3D and 4D Facial Expression Recognition pipelines on two publicly available facial expression databases and obtained promising results.     

三维人脸识别研究综述

近二十多年来,虽然基于图像的人脸识别已取得很大进展,并可在约束环境下获得很好的识别性能,但仍受光照、姿态、表情等变化的影响很大,其本质原因在于图像是三维物体在二维空间的简约投影.因此,利用脸部曲面的显式三维表达进行人脸识别正成为近几年学术界的研究热点.文中分析了三维人脸识别的产生动机、概念与基本过程;根据特征形式,将三维人脸识别算法分为基于空域直接匹配、基于局部特征匹配、基于整体特征匹配三大类进行综述;对二维和三维的双模态融合方法进行分类阐述;列出了部分代表性的三维人脸数据库;对部分方法进行实验比较,并分析了方法有效性的原因;总结了目前三维人脸识别技术的优势与困难,并探讨了未来的研究趋势.     

Deformation modeling for robust 3D face matching

Face recognition based on 3D surface matching is promising for overcoming some of the limitations of current 2D image-based face recognition systems. The 3D shape is generally invariant to the pose and lighting changes, but not invariant to the non-rigid facial movement, such as expressions. Collecting and storing multiple templates to account for various expressions for each subject in a large database is not practical. We propose a facial surface modeling and matching scheme to match 2.5D facial scans in the presence of both non-rigid deformations and pose changes (multiview) to a 3D face template. A hierarchical geodesic-based resampling approach is applied to extract landmarks for modeling facial surface deformations. We are able to synthesize the deformation learned from a small group of subjects (control group) onto a 3D neutral model (not in the control group), resulting in a deformed template. A user-specific (3D) deformable model is built by combining the templates with synthesized deformations. The matching distance is computed by fitting this generative deformable model to a test scan. A fully automatic and prototypic 3D face matching system has been developed. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed deformation modeling scheme increases the 3D face matching accuracy.     

Real-Time Pose-Invariant Face Recognition Using the Efficient Second-Order Minimization and the Pose Transforming Matrix

We propose a real-time pose-invariant face recognition algorithm from a gallery of frontal images only. (i) We modified the second-order minimization method for the active appearance model (AAM). This allows the AAM to have the ability of correct convergence with little loss of frame rate. (ii) We proposed a pose transforming matrix that can eliminate warping artifacts of the warped face image from AAM fitting. This makes it possible to train a neural network as the face recognizer with one frontal face image of each person in the gallery set. (iii) We propose a simple method for pose recognition by using neural networks to select the proper pose transforming matrix. The proposed algorithm was evaluated on a set of 2000 facial images of 10 people (200 images for each person obtained at various poses), achieving a great improvement in recognition.