The 3D shapes of faces are well known to be discriminative. Yet despite this, they are rarely used for face recognition and always under controlled viewing conditions. We claim that this is a symptom of a serious but often overlooked problem with existing methods for single view 3D face reconstruction: when applied "in the wild", their 3D estimates are either unstable and change for different photos of the same subject or they are over-regularized and generic. In response, we describe a robust method for regressing discriminative 3D morphable face models (3DMM). We use a convolutional neural network (CNN) to regress 3DMM shape and texture parameters directly from an input photo. We overcome the shortage of training data required for this purpose by offering a method for generating huge numbers of labeled examples. The 3D estimates produced by our CNN surpass state of the art accuracy on the MICC data set. Coupled with a 3D-3D face matching pipeline, we show the first competitive face recognition results on the LFW, YTF and IJB-A benchmarks using 3D face shapes as representations, rather than the opaque deep feature vectors used by other modern systems.
Example based methods , beginning from the work of @cite_29 and more recently @cite_15 @cite_40 , modify the 3D surface of example face shapes, fitting them to the face appearing in input photo. These methods favor robustness to challenging viewing conditions over detailed reconstructions. They were thus only used for face recognition to synthesize new views from unseen poses.
@cite_40 @cite_29 @cite_15
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Classical face recognition techniques have been successful at operating under well-controlled conditions; however, they have difficulty in robustly performing recognition in uncontrolled real-world scenarios where variations in pose, illumination, and expression are encountered. In this paper, we propose a new method for real-world unconstrained pose-invariant face recognition. We first construct a 3D model for each subject in our database using only a single 2D image by applying the 3D Generic Elastic Model (3D GEM) approach. These 3D models comprise an intermediate gallery database from which novel 2D pose views are synthesized for matching. Before matching, an initial estimate of the pose of the test query is obtained using a linear regression approach based on automatic facial landmark annotation. Each 3D model is subsequently rendered at different poses within a limited search space about the estimated pose, and the resulting images are matched against the test query. Finally, we compute the distances between the synthesized images and test query by using a simple normalized correlation matcher to show the effectiveness of our pose synthesis method to real-world data. We present convincing results on challenging data sets and video sequences demonstrating high recognition accuracy under controlled as well as unseen, uncontrolled real-world scenarios using a fast implementation. To enable real-time, person-independent 3D registration from 2D video, we developed a 3D cascade regression approach in which facial landmarks remain invariant across pose over a range of approximately 60. From a single 2D image of a person's face, a dense 3D shape is registered in real time for each frame. The algorithm utilizes a fast cascade regression framework trained on high-resolution 3D face-scans of posed and spontaneous emotion expression. The algorithm first estimates the location of a dense set of landmarks and their visibility, then reconstructs face shapes by fitting a part-based 3D model. Because no assumptions are required about illumination or surface properties, the method can be applied to a wide range of imaging conditions that include 2D video and uncalibrated multi-view video. The method has been validated in a battery of experiments that evaluate its precision of 3D reconstruction, extension to multi-view reconstruction, temporal integration for videos and 3D head-pose estimation. Experimental findings strongly support the validity of real-time, 3D registration and reconstruction from 2D video. The software is available online at http: zface.org. Display Omitted 3D cascade regression approach is proposed in which facial landmarks remain invariant.From a single 2D image of a person's face, a dense 3D shape is registered in real time for each frame.Multi-view reconstruction and temporal integration for videos are presented.Method is robust for 3D head-pose estimation under various conditions. We present an approach to simultaneously solve the two problems of face alignment and 3D face reconstruction from an input 2D face image of arbitrary poses and expressions. The proposed method iteratively and alternately applies two sets of cascaded regressors, one for updating 2D landmarks and the other for updating reconstructed pose-expression-normalized (PEN) 3D face shape. The 3D face shape and the landmarks are correlated via a 3D-to-2D mapping matrix. In each iteration, adjustment to the landmarks is firstly estimated via a landmark regressor, and this landmark adjustment is also used to estimate 3D face shape adjustment via a shape regressor. The 3D-to-2D mapping is then computed based on the adjusted 3D face shape and 2D landmarks, and it further refines the 2D landmarks. An effective algorithm is devised to learn these regressors based on a training dataset of pairing annotated 3D face shapes and 2D face images. Compared with existing methods, the proposed method can fully automatically generate PEN 3D face shapes in real time from a single 2D face image and locate both visible and invisible 2D landmarks. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method can achieve the state-of-the-art accuracy in both face alignment and 3D face reconstruction, and benefit face recognition owing to its reconstructed PEN 3D face shapes. To enable real-time, person-independent 3D registration from 2D video, we developed a 3D cascade regression approach in which facial landmarks remain invariant across pose over a range of approximately 60 degrees. From a single 2D image of a person's face, a dense 3D shape is registered in real time for each frame. The algorithm utilizes a fast cascade regression framework trained on high-resolution 3D face-scans of posed and spontaneous emotion expression. The algorithm first estimates the location of a dense set of markers and their visibility, then reconstructs face shapes by fitting a part-based 3D model. Because no assumptions are required about illumination or surface properties, the method can be applied to a wide range of imaging conditions that include 2D video and uncalibrated multi-view video. The method has been validated in a battery of experiments that evaluate its precision of 3D reconstruction and extension to multi-view reconstruction. Experimental findings strongly support the validity of real-time, 3D registration and reconstruction from 2D video. The software is available online at http: zface.org. State-of-the-art methods reconstruct three-dimensional (3D) face shapes from a single image by fitting 3D face models to input images or by directly learning mapping functions between two-dimensional (2D) images and 3D faces. However, they are often difficult to use in real-world applications due to expensive online optimization or to the requirement of frontal face images. This paper approaches the 3D face reconstruction problem as a regression problem rather than a model fitting problem. Given an input face image along with some pre-defined facial landmarks on it, a series of shape adjustments to the initial 3D face shape are computed through cascaded regressors based on the deviations between the input landmarks and the landmarks obtained from the reconstructed 3D faces. The cascaded regressors are offline learned from a set of 3D faces and their corresponding 2D face images in various views. By treating the landmarks that are invisible in large view angles as missing data, the proposed method can handle arbitrary view face images in a unified way with the same regressors. Experiments on the BFM and Bosphorus databases demonstrate that the proposed method can reconstruct 3D faces from arbitrary view images more efficiently and more accurately than existing methods. This paper presents a method for face recognition across variations in pose, ranging from frontal to profile views, and across a wide range of illuminations, including cast shadows and specular reflections. To account for these variations, the algorithm simulates the process of image formation in 3D space, using computer graphics, and it estimates 3D shape and texture of faces from single images. The estimate is achieved by fitting a statistical, morphable model of 3D faces to images. The model is learned from a set of textured 3D scans of heads. We describe the construction of the morphable model, an algorithm to fit the model to images, and a framework for face identification. In this framework, faces are represented by model parameters for 3D shape and texture. We present results obtained with 4,488 images from the publicly available CMU-PIE database and 1,940 images from the FERET database. We present a novel approach to address the representation issue and the matching issue in face recognition (verification). Firstly, our approach encodes the micro-structures of the face by a new learning-based encoding method. Unlike many previous manually designed encoding methods (e.g., LBP or SIFT), we use unsupervised learning techniques to learn an encoder from the training examples, which can automatically achieve very good tradeoff between discriminative power and invariance. Then we apply PCA to get a compact face descriptor. We find that a simple normalization mechanism after PCA can further improve the discriminative ability of the descriptor. The resulting face representation, learning-based (LE) descriptor, is compact, highly discriminative, and easy-to-extract. To handle the large pose variation in real-life scenarios, we propose a pose-adaptive matching method that uses pose-specific classifiers to deal with different pose combinations (e.g., frontal v.s. frontal, frontal v.s. left) of the matching face pair. Our approach is comparable with the state-of-the-art methods on the Labeled Face in Wild (LFW) benchmark (we achieved 84.45 recognition rate), while maintaining excellent compactness, simplicity, and generalization ability across different datasets. The "interpretation through synthesis" approach to analyze face images, particularly Active Appearance Models (AAMs) method, has become one of the most successful face modeling approaches over the last two decades. AAM models have ability to represent face images through synthesis using a controllable parameterized Principal Component Analysis (PCA) model. However, the accuracy and robustness of the synthesized faces of AAM are highly depended on the training sets and inherently on the generalizability of PCA subspaces. This paper presents a novel Deep Appearance Models (DAMs) approach, an efficient replacement for AAMs, to accurately capture both shape and texture of face images under large variations. In this approach, three crucial components represented in hierarchical layers are modeled using the Deep Boltzmann Machines (DBM) to robustly capture the variations of facial shapes and appearances. DAMs are therefore superior to AAMs in inferencing a representation for new face images under various challenging conditions. The proposed approach is evaluated in various applications to demonstrate its robustness and capabilities, i.e. facial super-resolution reconstruction, facial off-angle reconstruction or face frontalization, facial occlusion removal and age estimation using challenging face databases, i.e. Labeled Face Parts in the Wild (LFPW), Helen and FG-NET. Comparing to AAMs and other deep learning based approaches, the proposed DAMs achieve competitive results in those applications, thus this showed their advantages in handling occlusions, facial representation, and reconstruction. We start by asking an interesting yet challenging question, "If an eyewitness can only recall the eye features of the suspect, such that the forensic artist can only produce a sketch of the eyes (e.g., the top-left sketch shown in Fig. 1), can advanced computer vision techniques help generate the whole face image?" A more generalized question is that if a large proportion (e.g., more than 50 ) of the face sketch is missing, can a realistic whole face sketch image still be estimated. Existing face completion and generation methods either do not conduct domain transfer learning or can not handle large missing area. For example, the inpainting approach tends to blur the generated region when the missing area is large (i.e., more than 50 ). In this paper, we exploit the potential of deep learning networks in filling large missing region (e.g., as high as 95 missing) and generating realistic faces with high-fidelity in cross domains. We propose the recursive generation by bidirectional transformation networks (r-BTN) that recursively generates a whole face sketch from a small sketch face patch. The large missing area and the cross domain challenge make it difficult to generate satisfactory results using a unidirectional cross-domain learning structure. On the other hand, a forward and backward bidirectional learning between the face and sketch domains would enable recursive estimation of the missing region in an incremental manner (Fig. 1) and yield appealing results. r-BTN also adopts an adversarial constraint to encourage the generation of realistic faces sketches. Extensive experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the superior performance from r-BTN as compared to existing potential solutions. Photorealistic frontal view synthesis from a single face image has a wide range of applications in the field of face recognition. Although data-driven deep learning methods have been proposed to address this problem by seeking solutions from ample face data, this problem is still challenging because it is intrinsically ill-posed. This paper proposes a Two-Pathway Generative Adversarial Network (TP-GAN) for photorealistic frontal view synthesis by simultaneously perceiving global structures and local details. Four landmark located patch networks are proposed to attend to local textures in addition to the commonly used global encoderdecoder network. Except for the novel architecture, we make this ill-posed problem well constrained by introducing a combination of adversarial loss, symmetry loss and identity preserving loss. The combined loss function leverages both frontal face distribution and pre-trained discriminative deep face models to guide an identity preserving inference of frontal views from profiles. Different from previous deep learning methods that mainly rely on intermediate features for recognition, our method directly leverages the synthesized identity preserving image for downstream tasks like face recognition and attribution estimation. Experimental results demonstrate that our method not only presents compelling perceptual results but also outperforms state-of-theart results on large pose face recognition. The 3D shapes of faces are well known to be discriminative. Yet despite this, they are rarely used for face recognition and always under controlled viewing conditions. We claim that this is a symptom of a serious but often overlooked problem with existing methods for single view 3D face reconstruction: when applied in the wild, their 3D estimates are either unstable and change for different photos of the same subject or they are over-regularized and generic. In response, we describe a robust method for regressing discriminative 3D morphable face models (3DMM). We use a convolutional neural network (CNN) to regress 3DMM shape and texture parameters directly from an input photo. We overcome the shortage of training data required for this purpose by offering a method for generating huge numbers of labeled examples. The 3D estimates produced by our CNN surpass state of the art accuracy on the MICC data set. Coupled with a 3D-3D face matching pipeline, we show the first competitive face recognition results on the LFW, YTF and IJB-A benchmarks using 3D face shapes as representations, rather than the opaque deep feature vectors used by other modern systems. Human faces are remarkably similar in global properties, including size, aspect ratio, and location of main features, but can vary considerably in details across individuals, gender, race, or due to facial expression. We propose a novel method for 3D shape recovery of faces that exploits the similarity of faces. Our method obtains as input a single image and uses a mere single 3D reference model of a different person's face. Classical reconstruction methods from single images, i.e., shape-from-shading, require knowledge of the reflectance properties and lighting as well as depth values for boundary conditions. Recent methods circumvent these requirements by representing input faces as combinations (of hundreds) of stored 3D models. We propose instead to use the input image as a guide to "mold” a single reference model to reach a reconstruction of the sought 3D shape. Our method assumes Lambertian reflectance and uses harmonic representations of lighting. It has been tested on images taken under controlled viewing conditions as well as on uncontrolled images downloaded from the Internet, demonstrating its accuracy and robustness under a variety of imaging conditions and overcoming significant differences in shape between the input and reference individuals including differences in facial expressions, gender, and race. Researchers have been working on human face recognition for decades. Face recognition is hard due to different types of variations in face images, such as pose, illumination and expression, among which pose variation is the hardest one to deal with. To improve face recognition under pose variation, this paper presents a geometry assisted probabilistic approach. We approximate a human head with a 3D ellipsoid model, so that any face image is a 2D projection of such a 3D ellipsoid at a certain pose. In this approach, both training and test images are back projected to the surface of the 3D ellipsoid, according to their estimated poses, to form the texture maps. Thus the recognition can be conducted by comparing the texture maps instead of the original images, as done in traditional face recognition. In addition, we represent the texture map as an array of local patches, which enables us to train a probabilistic model for comparing corresponding patches. By conducting experiments on the CMU PIE database, we show that the proposed algorithm provides better performance than the existing algorithms. We present a novel model based stereo system, which accurately extracts the 3D shape and pose of faces from multiple images taken simultaneously. Extracting the 3D shape from images is important in areas such as pose-invariant face recognition and image manipulation. The method is based on a 3D morphable face model learned from a database of facial scans. The use of a strong face prior allows us to extract high precision surfaces from stereo data of faces, where traditional correlation based stereo methods fail because of the mostly textureless input images. The method uses two or more uncalibrated images of arbitrary baseline, estimating calibration and shape simultaneously. Results using two and three input images are presented. We replace the lighting and albedo estimation of a monocular method with the use of stereo information, making the system more accurate and robust. We evaluate the method using ground truth data and the standard PIE image dataset. A comparison with the state of the art monocular system shows that the new method has a significantly higher accuracy. Face recognition under varying pose is a challenging problem, especially when illumination variations are also present. In this paper, we propose to address one of the most challenging scenarios in face recognition. That is, to identify a subject from a test image that is acquired under dierent pose and illumination condition from only one training sample (also known as a gallery image) of this subject in the database. For example, the test image could be semifrontal and illuminated by multiple lighting sources while the corresponding training image is frontal under a single lighting source. Under the assumption of Lambertian reflectance, the spherical harmonics representation has proved to be effective in modeling illumination variations for a fixed pose. In this paper, we extend the spherical harmonics representation to encode pose information. More specifically, we utilize the fact that 2D harmonic basis images at different poses are related by close-form linear transformations, and give a more convenient transformation matrix to be directly used for basis images. An immediate application is that we can easily synthesize a different view of a subject under arbitrary lighting conditions by changing the coefficients of the spherical harmonics representation. A more important result is an efficient face recognition method, based on the orthonormality of the linear transformations, for solving the above-mentioned challenging scenario. Thus, we directly project a nonfrontal view test image onto the space of frontal view harmonic basis images. The impact of some empirical factors due to the projection is embedded in a sparse warping matrix; for most cases, we show that the recognition performance does not deteriorate after warping the test image to the frontal view. Very good recognition results are obtained using this method for both synthetic and challenging real images. The “interpretation through synthesis”, i.e. Active Appearance Models (AAMs) method, has received considerable attention over the past decades. It aims at “explaining” face images by synthesizing them via a parameterized model of appearance. It is quite challenging due to appearance variations of human face images, e.g. facial poses, occlusions, lighting, low resolution, etc. Since these variations are mostly non-linear, it is impossible to represent them in a linear model, such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA). This paper presents a novel Deep Appearance Models (DAMs) approach, an efficient replacement for AAMs, to accurately capture both shape and texture of face images under large variations. In this approach, three crucial components represented in hierarchical layers are modeled using the Deep Boltzmann Machines (DBM) to robustly capture the variations of facial shapes and appearances. DAMs are therefore superior to AAMs in inferring a representation for new face images under various challenging conditions. In addition, DAMs have ability to generate a compact set of parameters in higher level representation that can be used for classification, e.g. face recognition and facial age estimation. The proposed approach is evaluated in facial image reconstruction, facial super-resolution on two databases, i.e. LFPW and Helen. It is also evaluated on FG-NET database for the problem of age estimation. We present a robust method for estimating the facial pose and shape information from a densely annotated facial image. The method relies on Convolutional Point-set Representation (CPR), a carefully designed matrix representation to summarize different layers of information encoded in the set of detected points in the annotated image. The CPR disentangles the dependencies of shape and different pose parameters and enables updating different parameters in a sequential manner via convolutional neural networks and recurrent layers. When updating the pose parameters, we sample reprojection errors along with a predicted direction and update the parameters based on the pattern of reprojection errors. This technique boosts the model's capability in searching a local minimum under challenging scenarios. We also demonstrate that annotation from different sources can be merged under the framework of CPR and contributes to outperforming the current state-of-the-art solutions for 3D face alignment. Experiments indicate the proposed CPRFA (CPR-based Face Alignment) significantly improves 3D alignment accuracy when the densely annotated image contains noise and missing values, which is common under "in-the-wild" acquisition scenarios. In this work, we propose and experiment an original solution to 3D face recognition that supports face matching also in the case of probe scans with missing parts. In the proposed approach, distinguishing traits of the face are captured by first extracting 3D keypoints of the scan and then measuring how the face surface changes in the keypoints neighborhood using local shape descriptors. In particular: 3D keypoints detection relies on the adaptation to the case of 3D faces of the meshDOG algorithm that has been demonstrated to be effective for 3D keypoints extraction from generic objects; as 3D local descriptors we used the HOG descriptor and also proposed two alternative solutions that develop, respectively, on the histogram of orientations and the geometric histogram descriptors. Face similarity is evaluated by comparing local shape descriptors across inlier pairs of matching keypoints between probe and gallery scans. The face recognition accuracy of the approach has been first experimented on the difficult probes included in the new 2D 3D Florence face dataset that has been recently collected and released at the University of Firenze, and on the Binghamton University 3D facial expression dataset. Then, a comprehensive comparative evaluation has been performed on the Bosphorus, Gavab and UND FRGC v2.0 databases, where competitive results with respect to existing solutions for 3D face biometrics have been obtained. Graphical abstractDisplay Omitted Highlights3D face recognition approach deployable in real non-cooperative contexts of use.Fully-3D approach, based on keypoints detection, description and matching.MeshDOG keypoints detector combined with the multi-ring GH descriptor.RANSAC algorithm included for outlier removal from matching keypoints.State of the art accuracy for recognizing 3D scans with missing parts. Given a photo collection of “unconstrained” face images of one individual captured under a variety of unknown pose, expression, and illumination conditions, this paper presents a method for reconstructing a 3D face surface model of the individual along with albedo information. Unlike prior work on face reconstruction that requires large photo collections, we formulate an approach to adapt to photo collections with a high diversity in both the number of images and the image quality. To achieve this, we incorporate prior knowledge about face shape by fitting a 3D morphable model to form a personalized template, following by using a novel photometric stereo formulation to complete the fine details, under a coarse-to-fine scheme. Our scheme incorporates a structural similarity-based local selection step to help identify a common expression for reconstruction while discarding occluded portions of faces. The evaluation of reconstruction performance is through a novel quality measure, in the absence of ground truth 3D scans. Superior large-scale experimental results are reported on synthetic, Internet, and personal photo collections. We present a novel approach for synthesizing photo-realistic images of people in arbitrary poses using generative adversarial learning. Given an input image of a person and a desired pose represented by a 2D skeleton, our model renders the image of the same person under the new pose, synthesizing novel views of the parts visible in the input image and hallucinating those that are not seen. This problem has recently been addressed in a supervised manner, i.e., during training the ground truth images under the new poses are given to the network. We go beyond these approaches by proposing a fully unsupervised strategy. We tackle this challenging scenario by splitting the problem into two principal subtasks. First, we consider a pose conditioned bidirectional generator that maps back the initially rendered image to the original pose, hence being directly comparable to the input image without the need to resort to any training image. Second, we devise a novel loss function that incorporates content and style terms, and aims at producing images of high perceptual quality. Extensive experiments conducted on the DeepFashion dataset demonstrate that the images rendered by our model are very close in appearance to those obtained by fully supervised approaches.