An Intrinsic Framework for Analysis of Facial Surfaces

A statistical analysis of shapes of facial surfaces can play an important role in biometric authentication and other face-related applications. The main difficulty in developing such an analysis comes from the lack of a canonical system to represent and compare all facial surfaces. This paper suggests a specific, yet natural, coordinate system on facial surfaces, that enables comparisons of their shapes. Here a facial surface is represented as an indexed collection of closed curves, called facial curves, that are level curves of a surface distance function from the tip of the nose. Defining the space of all such representations of face, this paper studies its differential geometry and endows it with a Riemannian metric. It presents numerical techniques for computing geodesic paths between facial surfaces in that space. This Riemannian framework is then used to: (i) compute distances between faces to quantify differences in their shapes, (ii) find optimal deformations between faces, and (iii) define and compute average of a given set of faces. Experimental results generated using laser-scanned faces are presented to demonstrate these ideas.     

Elastic Shape Models for Face Analysis Using Curvilinear Coordinates

This paper studies the problem of analyzing variability in shapes of facial surfaces using a Riemannian framework, a fundamental approach that allows for joint matchings, comparisons, and deformations of faces under a chosen metric. The starting point is to impose a curvilinear coordinate system, named the Darcyan coordinate system, on facial surfaces; it is based on the level curves of the surface distance function measured from the tip of the nose. Each facial surface is now represented as an indexed collection of these level curves. The task of finding optimal deformations, or geodesic paths, between facial surfaces reduces to that of finding geodesics between level curves, which is accomplished using the theory of elastic shape analysis of 3D curves. The elastic framework allows for nonlinear matching between curves and between points across curves. The resulting geodesics between facial surfaces provide optimal elastic deformations between faces and an elastic metric for comparing facial shapes. We demonstrate this idea using examples from FSU face database.

基于面部曲线弹性匹配的三维人脸识别方法

提出一种基于面部径向曲线弹性匹配的三维人脸识别方法。使用人脸曲 面上的多条曲线表征人脸曲面,提取三维人脸上从鼻尖点发射的多条面部径向曲线,对其进 行分层弹性匹配和点距对应匹配,根据人脸不同部位受表情影响程度不同,对不同曲线识别 相似度赋予不同权重进行加权融合作为总相似度用于识别。测试结果表明该方法具有很好的 识别性能,并且对表情、遮挡和噪声具有较好的鲁棒性。     

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。     

Reshaping 3D facial scans for facial appearance modeling and 3D facial expression analysis

3D face scans have been widely used for face modeling and analysis. Due to the fact that face scans provide variable point clouds across frames, they may not capture complete facial data or miss point-to-point correspondences across various facial scans, thus causing difficulties to use such data for analysis. This paper presents an efficient approach to representing facial shapes from face scans through the reconstruction of face models based on regional information and a generic model. A new approach for 3D feature detection and a hybrid approach using two vertex mapping algorithms, displacement mapping and point-to-surface mapping, and a regional blending algorithm are proposed to reconstruct the facial surface detail. The resulting models can represent individual facial shapes consistently and adaptively, establishing facial point correspondences across individual models. The accuracy of the generated models is evaluated quantitatively. The applicability of the models is validated through the application of 3D facial expression recognition using the static 3DFE and dynamic 4DFE databases. A comparison with the state of the art has also been reported.     

Passive Three Dimensional Face Recognition Using Iso-Geodesic Contours and Procrustes Analysis

We introduce a new model for personal recognition based on the 3-D geometry of the face. The model is designed for application scenarios where the acquisition conditions constrain the facial position. The 3-D structure of a facial surface is compactly represented by sets of contours (facial contours) extracted around automatically pinpointed nose tip and inner eye corners. The metric used to decide whether a point on the face belongs to a facial contour is its geodesic distance from a given landmark. Iso-geodesic contours are inherently robust to head pose variations, including in-depth rotations of the face. Since these contours are extracted from rigid parts of the face, the resulting recognition algorithms are insensitive to changes in facial expressions. The facial contours are encoded using innovative pose invariant features, including Procrustean distances defined on pose-invariant curves. The extracted features are combined in a hierarchical manner to create three parallel face recognizers. Inspired by the effectiveness of region ensembles approaches, the three recognizers constructed around the nose tip and inner corners of the eyes are fused both at the feature-level and the match score-level to create a unified face recognition algorithm with boosted performance. The performances of the proposed algorithms are evaluated and compared with other algorithms from the literature on a large public database appropriate for the assumed constrained application scenario.     

基于轮廓线局部描述符的三维人脸识别

提出了一种基于等测地轮廓线的局部描述符来识别三维人脸。首先对三维人脸数据进行预处理, 得到统一的人脸区域并进行姿态归一化; 然后根据测地距离提取到鼻尖点相同距离的点组成等测地轮廓线, 对轮廓线进行重采样, 并对轮廓线上每个采样点的邻域提取局部描述符; 最后在建立测试人脸和库集人脸的点对应关系后进行局部描述符的加权融合和比较, 给出最终识别结果。算法在FRGC(face recognition grand challenge)v2. 0数据库上进行测试, 实验结果表明该方法具有较好的识别性能。     

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.     

Constructing Facial Identity Surfaces for Recognition

We present a novel approach to face recognition by constructing facial identity structures across views and over time, referred to as identity surfaces, in a Kernel Discriminant Analysis (KDA) feature space. This approach is aimed at addressing three challenging problems in face recognition: modelling faces across multiple views, extracting non-linear discriminatory features, and recognising faces over time. First, a multi-view face model is designed which can be automatically fitted to face images and sequences to extract the normalised facial texture patterns. This model is capable of dealing with faces with large pose variation. Second, KDA is developed to compute the most significant non-linear basis vectors with the intention of maximising the between-class variance and minimising the within-class variance. We applied KDA to the problem of multi-view face recognition, and a significant improvement has been achieved in reliability and accuracy. Third, identity surfaces are constructed in a pose-parameterised discriminatory feature space. Dynamic face recognition is then performed by matching the object trajectory computed from a video input and model trajectories constructed on the identity surfaces. These two types of trajectories encode the spatio-temporal dynamics of moving faces.     

A 3D face matching framework for facial curves

Among the many 3D face matching techniques that have been developed, are variants of 3D facial curve matching, which reduce the amount of face data to one or a few 3D curves. The face’s central profile, for instance, proved to work well. However, the selection of the optimal set of 3D curves and the best way to match them has not been researched systematically. We propose a 3D face matching framework that allows profile and contour based face matching. Using this framework we evaluate profile and contour types including those described in the literature, and select subsets of facial curves for effective and efficient face matching. With a set of eight geodesic contours we achieve a mean average precision (MAP) of 0.70 and 92.5% recognition rate (RR) on the 3D face retrieval track of the Shape Retrieval Contest (SHREC’08), and a MAP of 0.96 and 97.6% RR on the University of Notre Dame (UND) test set. Face matching with these curves is time-efficient and performs better than other sets of facial curves and depth map comparison.     

Multiscale morphology based illumination normalization with enhanced local textures for face recognition

A key challenge of face recognition is to obtain illumination invariant face images while preserving the discriminative features. The locations and shapes of small-scale features (e.g. eyebrows, eyes, nostrils, a mouth, etc.) are usually treated as key features for face recognition. However, it has also been observed that the local texture information of facial regions contains intrinsic facial features and needs to be enhanced to improve performance. To compensate for the illumination effects that appeared while extracting both the small-scale features and the texture information, we used multiscale morphological techniques. We used a generalized dynamic morphological quotient image (GDMQI) method based on Retinex theory and multiscale morphological closing to solve the artifact problem discussed in previous works. The proposed method consisted of two main steps: (i) illumination estimation and (ii) texture enhancement. The proposed method showed improved performance when using the CMU PIE, AR and Extended Yale-B databases.     

Facial expression recognition – A real time approach

Face localization, feature extraction, and modeling are the major issues in automatic facial expression recognition. In this paper, a method for facial expression recognition is proposed. A face is located by extracting the head contour points using the motion information. A rectangular bounding box is fitted for the face region using those extracted contour points. Among the facial features, eyes are the most prominent features used for determining the size of a face. Hence eyes are located and the visual features of a face are extracted based on the locations of eyes. The visual features are modeled using support vector machine (SVM) for facial expression recognition. The SVM finds an optimal hyperplane to distinguish different facial expressions with an accuracy of 98.5%.     

基于特征点表情变化的3维人脸识别

目的 为克服表情变化对3维人脸识别的影响,提出一种基于特征点提取局部区域特征的3维人脸识别方法。方法 首先,在深度图上应用2维图像的ASM(active shape model)算法粗略定位出人脸特征点,再根据Shape index特征在人脸点云上精确定位出特征点。其次,提取以鼻中为中心的一系列等测地轮廓线来表征人脸形状;然后,提取具有姿态不变性的Procrustean向量特征(距离和角度)作为识别特征;最后,对各条等测地轮廓线特征的分类结果进行了比较,并对分类结果进行决策级融合。结果 在FRGC V2.0人脸数据库分别进行特征点定位实验和识别实验,平均定位误差小于2.36 mm,Rank-1识别率为98.35%。结论 基于特征点的3维人脸识别方法,通过特征点在人脸近似刚性区域提取特征,有效避免了受表情影响较大的嘴部区域。实验证明该方法具有较高的识别精度,同时对姿态、表情变化具有一定的鲁棒性。     

脸部特征点定位方法综述

人脸识别技术极大推动了图像处理、模式识别、计算机视觉等诸多学科的发展。人脸部特征点的定位是人脸识别中的关键步骤,定位准确与否直接关系到后续应用的可靠性。系统综述了特征点定位六大类方法,分为基于灰度信息、先验规则、几何形状、统计模型、小波和3D方法,并给出了对各方法的性能评价以及对未来的展望。     

Physiology-based face recognition in the thermal infrared spectrum

The current dominant approaches to face recognition rely on facial characteristics that are on or over the skin. Some of these characteristics have low permanency can be altered, and their phenomenology varies significantly with environmental factors (e.g., lighting). Many methodologies have been developed to address these problems to various degrees. However, the current framework of face recognition research has a potential weakness due to its very nature. We present a novel framework for face recognition based on physiological information. The motivation behind this effort is to capitalize on the permanency of innate characteristics that are under the skin. To establish feasibility, we propose a specific methodology to capture facial physiological patterns using the bioheat information contained in thermal imagery. First, the algorithm delineates the human face from the background using the Bayesian framework. Then, it localizes the superficial blood vessel network using image morphology. The extracted vascular network produces contour shapes that are characteristic to each individual. The branching points of the skeletonized vascular network are referred to as Thermal Minutia Points (TMPs) and constitute the feature database. To render the method robust to facial pose variations, we collect for each subject to be stored in the database five different pose images (center, midleft profile, left profile, midright profile, and right profile). During the classification stage, the algorithm first estimates the pose of the test image. Then, it matches the local and global TMP structures extracted from the test image with those of the corresponding pose images in the database. We have conducted experiments on a multipose database of thermal facial images collected in our laboratory, as well as on the time-gap database of the University of Notre Dame. The good experimental results show that the proposed methodology has merit, especially with respect to the problem of low permanence over time. More importantly, the results demonstrate the feasibility of the physiological framework in face recognition and open the way for further methodological and experimental research in the area.     

Novel Multiclass Classifiers Based on the Minimization of the Within-Class Variance

In this paper, a novel class of multiclass classifiers inspired by the optimization of Fisher discriminant ratio and the support vector machine (SVM) formulation is introduced. The optimization problem of the so-called minimum within-class variance multiclass classifiers (MWCVMC) is formulated and solved in arbitrary Hilbert spaces, defined by Mercer's kernels, in order to find multiclass decision hyperplanes/surfaces. Afterwards, MWCVMCs are solved using indefinite kernels and dissimilarity measures via pseudo-Euclidean embedding. The power of the proposed approach is first demonstrated in the facial expression recognition of the seven basic facial expressions (i.e., anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise plus the neutral state) problem in the presence of partial facial occlusion by using a pseudo-Euclidean embedding of Hausdorff distances and the MWCVMC. The experiments indicated a recognition accuracy rate achieved up to 99%. The MWCVMC classifiers are also applied to face recognition and other classification problems using Mercer's kernels.     

基于多分离部件稀疏编码的人脸图像分析

考虑到不同部件(眼睛,嘴等)对人脸分析的贡献差别,提出基于多部件稀疏编码的人脸图像分析方法.首先,选取对人脸(表情)分析影响较大的几个人脸部件,然后,利用多视角稀疏编码方法学习各部件的字典,并计算相应的稀疏编码,最后,将稀疏编码输入分类器(支持向量机和最小均方误差)进行判决.分别在数据库JAFFE和Yale上进行人脸(表情)识别及有遮挡的人脸(表情)识别实验.实验结果表明,基于多部件稀疏编码的人脸分析能较好地调节各部件的权重,优于各单一部件和简单的多部件融合方法的性能.     

基于流形的表情分解算法

提出了基于流形的表情分解算法。首先,运用保局投影将图像投影到低维的表情流形子空间,再在流形子空间里对它们进行高阶奇异值分解,最后在个人子空间和表情子空间里完成人脸和表情识别。该算法用流形学习解决了高阶奇异值分解中的图像特征值提取问题,用高阶奇异值分解解决了流形表情识别中个人模式影响表情识别的问题。是一种流形学习与高阶奇异值分解优势互补的算法。在CMU-AMP和JAFFE人脸库上的实验表明,该算法对人脸和表情识别都十分有效。