Salient feature and reliable classifier selection for facial expression classification

A novel facial expression classification (FEC) method is presented and evaluated. The classification process is decomposed into multiple two-class classification problems, a choice that is analytically justified, and unique sets of features are extracted for each classification problem. Specifically, for each two-class problem, an iterative feature selection process that utilizes a class separability measure is employed to create salient feature vectors (SFVs), where each SFV is composed of a selected feature subset. Subsequently, two-class discriminant analysis is applied on the SFVs to produce salient discriminant hyper-planes (SDHs), which are used to train the corresponding two-class classifiers. To properly integrate the two-class classification results and produce the FEC decision, a computationally efficient and fast classification scheme is developed. During each step of this scheme, the most reliable classifier is identified and utilized, thus, a more accurate final classification decision is produced. The JAFFE and the MMI databases are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed salient-feature-and-reliable-classifier selection (SFRCS) methodology. Classification rates of 96.71% and 93.61% are achieved under the leave-one-sample-out evaluation strategy, and 85.92% under the leave-one-subject-out evaluation strategy.     

Subclass discriminant Nonnegative Matrix Factorization for facial image analysis

Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) is among the most popular subspace methods, widely used in a variety of image processing problems. Recently, a discriminant NMF method that incorporates Linear Discriminant Analysis inspired criteria has been proposed, which achieves an efficient decomposition of the provided data to its discriminant parts, thus enhancing classification performance. However, this approach possesses certain limitations, since it assumes that the underlying data distribution is unimodal, which is often unrealistic. To remedy this limitation, we regard that data inside each class have a multimodal distribution, thus forming clusters and use criteria inspired by Clustering based Discriminant Analysis. The proposed method incorporates appropriate discriminant constraints in the NMF decomposition cost function in order to address the problem of finding discriminant projections that enhance class separability in the reduced dimensional projection space, while taking into account subclass information. The developed algorithm has been applied for both facial expression and face recognition on three popular databases. Experimental results verified that it successfully identified discriminant facial parts, thus enhancing recognition performance.     

Multi-view human movement recognition based on fuzzy distances and linear discriminant analysis

In this paper, a novel multi-view human movement recognition method is presented. A novel representation of multi-view human movement videos is proposed that is based on learning basic multi-view human movement primitives, called multi-view dynemes. The movement video is represented in a new feature space (called dyneme space) using these multi-view dynemes, thus producing a time invariant multi-view movement representation. Fuzzy distances from the multi-view dynemes are used to represent the human body postures in the dyneme space. Three variants of Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) are evaluated to achieve a discriminant movement representation in a low dimensionality space. The view identification problem is solved either by using a circular block shift procedure followed by the evaluation of the minimum Euclidean distance from any dyneme, or by exploiting the circular shift invariance property of the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT). The discriminant movement representation combined with camera viewpoint identification and a nearest centroid classification step leads to a high human movement classification accuracy.     

De-identifying facial images using singular value decomposition and projections

In this paper, two methods are presented that manipulate images to hinder automatic face identification. They partly degrade image quality, so that humans can identify the persons in a scene, while face identification algorithms fail to do so. The approaches used involve: a) singular value decomposition (SVD) and b) image projections on hyperspheres. Simulation experiments verify that these methods reduce the percentage of correct face identification rate by over 90 %. Additionally, the final image is not degraded beyond recognition by humans, in contrast with the majority of other de-identification methods.     

Dynamic action recognition based on dynemes and Extreme Learning Machine

In this paper, we propose a novel method that performs dynamic action classification by exploiting the effectiveness of the Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) algorithm for single hidden layer feedforward neural networks training. It involves data grouping and ELM based data projection in multiple levels. Given a test action instance, a neural network is trained by using labeled action instances forming the groups that reside to the test sample’s neighborhood. The action instances involved in this procedure are, subsequently, mapped to a new feature space, determined by the trained network outputs. This procedure is performed multiple times, which are determined by the test action instance at hand, until only a single class is retained. Experimental results denote the effectiveness of the dynamic classification approach, compared to the static one, as well as the effectiveness of the ELM in the proposed dynamic classification setting.     

Blind robust watermarking schemes for copyright protection of 3D mesh objects

In this paper, two novel methods suitable for blind 3D mesh object watermarking applications are proposed. The first method is robust against 3D rotation, translation, and uniform scaling. The second one is robust against both geometric and mesh simplification attacks. A pseudorandom watermarking signal is cast in the 3D mesh object by deforming its vertices geometrically, without altering the vertex topology. Prior to watermark embedding and detection, the object is rotated and translated so that its center of mass and its principal component coincide with the origin and the z-axis of the Cartesian coordinate system. This geometrical transformation ensures watermark robustness to translation and rotation. Robustness to uniform scaling is achieved by restricting the vertex deformations to occur only along the r coordinate of the corresponding (r, /spl theta/, /spl phi/) spherical coordinate system. In the first method, a set of vertices that correspond to specific angles /spl theta/ is used for watermark embedding. In the second method, the samples of the watermark sequence are embedded in a set of vertices that correspond to a range of angles in the /spl theta/ domain in order to achieve robustness against mesh simplifications. Experimental results indicate the ability of the proposed method to deal with the aforementioned attacks.     

Caricature generation utilizing the notion of anti-face

The production of caricatures is a particularly interesting field of art, because it aims to highlight the very essence of a given face. Caricature generation systems traditionally rely on two approaches: they either follow extracted rules through learning algorithms, or follow rules that were directly programmed by experts. This paper attempts to reduce the reliance on heuristic methods, by proposing a novel method that provides a set of well-defined rules, which can be put to use for the purpose of caricature generation. The method is based on the notion of anti-face in conjunction with unbiased distortions. In addition, we indicate the usefulness of the anti-face as a means to perceive, for our own sake, the degree to which our face seems peculiar to others. Finally, we deploy a reverse variant of the method in order to attain beautification.

     

Exploiting tf-idf in deep Convolutional Neural Networks for Content Based Image Retrieval

Multimedia Tools and Applications - In this paper, a novel term frequency-inverse document frequency (tf-idf) based method that utilizes deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) for Content Based...     

Morphological elastic graph matching applied to frontal face authentication under well-controlled and real conditions

In this paper, morphological elastic graph matching is applied to frontal face authentication on databases ranging from small to large multimedia ones collected under either well-controlled or real-world conditions.It is shown that the morphological elastic graph matching achieves a very low equal error rate on databases collected under well-controlled conditions. However, its performance deteriorates when it is applied to databases recorded in real-world scenarios. The compensation for variable recording conditions such as changes in illumination, scale differences and varying face position prior to the application of morphological elastic matching is proposed.