Facial attribute analysis in the real world scenario is very challenging mainly because of complex face variations. Existing works of analyzing face attributes are mostly based on the cropped and aligned face images. However, this result in the capability of attribute prediction heavily relies on the preprocessing of face detector. To address this problem, we present a novel jointly learned deep architecture for both facial attribute analysis and face detection. Our framework can process the natural images in the wild and our experiments on CelebA and LFWA datasets clearly show that the state-of-the-art performance is obtained.
It was first studied by @cite_23 . In term of different visual features and distinctive learning paradigm, the facial attribute analysis has been developed into three categories: (1) the methods @cite_23 of using hand-crafted visual features, such as SIFT @cite_13 and LBP @cite_16 ; (2) the methods of utilizing the recent deep features @cite_7 @cite_9 @cite_15 ; and (3) multi-task methods of learning facial attribute @cite_0 @cite_6 . We here highlight the differences between our architecture and these previous works. Liu @cite_7 cascaded three deep networks pre-trained for facial attribute prediction. In contrast, we show that the tasks of face detection and facial attribute prediction are highly correlated and our jointly learning architecture can improve both tasks. Rudd @cite_6 introduced a mixed objective optimization network which utilizes distribution of attribute labels to learn each task. Abdulnabi @cite_0 proposed a multi-task CNN model sharing of visual knowledge between tasks for facial attribute analysis. Comparing with @cite_6 @cite_0 , we focus on jointly learning the face detection and facial attribute analysis; and our model can predict facial attributes on the images in the wild @cite_6 @cite_15 without cropped and aligned, as illustrated in Fig. and Fig. .
@cite_7 @cite_9 @cite_6 @cite_0 @cite_23 @cite_15 @cite_16 @cite_13
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This paper presents a new approach for facial attribute classification using a multi-task learning approach. Unlike other approaches that uses hand engineered features, our model learns a shared feature representation that is wellsuited for multiple attribute classification. Learning a joint feature representation enables interaction between different tasks. For learning this shared feature representation we use a Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) based model, enhanced with a factored multi-task component to become Multi-Task Restricted Boltzmann Machine (MT-RBM). Our approach operates directly on faces and facial landmark points to learn a joint feature representation over all the available attributes. We use an iterative learning approach consisting of a bottom-up top-down pass to learn the shared representation of our multi-task model and at inference we use a bottom-up pass to predict the different tasks. Our approach is not restricted to any type of attributes, however, for this paper we focus only on facial attributes. We evaluate our approach on three publicly available datasets, the Celebrity Faces (CelebA), the Multi-task Facial Landmarks (MTFL), and the ChaLearn challenge dataset. We show superior classification performance improvement over the state-of-the-art. Predicting attributes from face images in the wild is a challenging computer vision problem. To automatically describe face attributes from face containing images, traditionally one needs to cascade three technical blocks --- face localization, facial descriptor construction, and attribute classification --- in a pipeline. As a typical classification problem, face attribute prediction has been addressed using deep learning. Current state-of-the-art performance was achieved by using two cascaded Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), which were specifically trained to learn face localization and attribute description. In this paper, we experiment with an alternative way of employing the power of deep representations from CNNs. Combining with conventional face localization techniques, we use off-the-shelf architectures trained for face recognition to build facial descriptors. Recognizing that the describable face attributes are diverse, our face descriptors are constructed from different levels of the CNNs for different attributes to best facilitate face attribute prediction. Experiments on two large datasets, LFWA and CelebA, show that our approach is entirely comparable to the state-of-the-art. Our findings not only demonstrate an efficient face attribute prediction approach, but also raise an important question: how to leverage the power of off-the-shelf CNN representations for novel tasks. Abstract Deep Neural Network (DNN) has recently achieved outstanding performance in a variety of computer vision tasks, including facial attribute classification. The great success of classifying facial attributes with DNN often relies on a massive amount of labelled data. However, in real-world applications, labelled data are only provided for some commonly used attributes (such as age, gender); whereas, unlabelled data are available for other attributes (such as attraction, hairline). To address the above problem, we propose a novel deep transfer neural network method based on multi-label learning for facial attribute classification, termed FMTNet, which consists of three sub-networks: the Face detection Network (FNet), the Multi-label learning Network (MNet) and the Transfer learning Network (TNet). Firstly, based on the Faster Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (Faster R-CNN), FNet is fine-tuned for face detection. Then, MNet is fine-tuned by FNet to predict multiple attributes with labelled data, where an effective loss weight scheme is developed to explicitly exploit the correlation between facial attributes based on attribute grouping. Finally, based on MNet, TNet is trained by taking advantage of unsupervised domain adaptation for unlabelled facial attribute classification. The three sub-networks are tightly coupled to perform effective facial attribute classification. A distinguishing characteristic of the proposed FMTNet method is that the three sub-networks (FNet, MNet and TNet) are constructed in a similar network structure. Extensive experimental results on challenging face datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method compared with several state-of-the-art methods. We consider the task of predicting various traits of a person given an image of their face. We estimate both objective traits, such as gender, ethnicity and hair-color; as well as subjective traits, such as the emotion a person expresses or whether he is humorous or attractive. For sizeable experimentation, we contribute a new Face Attributes Dataset (FAD), having roughly 200,000 attribute labels for the above traits, for over 10,000 facial images. Due to the recent surge of research on Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), we begin by using a CNN architecture for estimating facial attributes and show that they indeed provide an impressive baseline performance. To further improve performance, we propose a novel approach that incorporates facial landmark information for input images as an additional channel, helping the CNN learn better attribute-specific features so that the landmarks across various training images hold correspondence. We empirically analyse the performance of our method, showing consistent improvement over the baseline across traits. This paper presents a method for face detection in the wild, which integrates a ConvNet and a 3D mean face model in an end-to-end multi-task discriminative learning framework. The 3D mean face model is predefined and fixed (e.g., we used the one provided in the AFLW dataset). The ConvNet consists of two components: (i) The face pro- posal component computes face bounding box proposals via estimating facial key-points and the 3D transformation (rotation and translation) parameters for each predicted key-point w.r.t. the 3D mean face model. (ii) The face verification component computes detection results by prun- ing and refining proposals based on facial key-points based configuration pooling. The proposed method addresses two issues in adapting state- of-the-art generic object detection ConvNets (e.g., faster R-CNN) for face detection: (i) One is to eliminate the heuristic design of prede- fined anchor boxes in the region proposals network (RPN) by exploit- ing a 3D mean face model. (ii) The other is to replace the generic RoI (Region-of-Interest) pooling layer with a configuration pooling layer to respect underlying object structures. The multi-task loss consists of three terms: the classification Softmax loss and the location smooth l1 -losses [14] of both the facial key-points and the face bounding boxes. In ex- periments, our ConvNet is trained on the AFLW dataset only and tested on the FDDB benchmark with fine-tuning and on the AFW benchmark without fine-tuning. The proposed method obtains very competitive state-of-the-art performance in the two benchmarks. This paper presents a method for face detection in the wild, which integrates a ConvNet and a 3D mean face model in an end-to-end multi-task discriminative learning framework. The 3D mean face model is predefined and fixed (e.g., we used the one provided in the AFLW dataset). The ConvNet consists of two components: (i) The face proposal component computes face bounding box proposals via estimating facial key-points and the 3D transformation (rotation and translation) parameters for each predicted key-point w.r.t. the 3D mean face model. (ii) The face verification component computes detection results by pruning and refining proposals based on facial key-points based configuration pooling. The proposed method addresses two issues in adapting state-of-the-art generic object detection ConvNets (e.g., faster R-CNN) for face detection: (i) One is to eliminate the heuristic design of predefined anchor boxes in the region proposals network (RPN) by exploiting a 3D mean face model. (ii) The other is to replace the generic RoI (Region-of-Interest) pooling layer with a configuration pooling layer to respect underlying object structures. The multi-task loss consists of three terms: the classification Softmax loss and the location smooth (l_1 )-losses of both the facial key-points and the face bounding boxes. In experiments, our ConvNet is trained on the AFLW dataset only and tested on the FDDB benchmark with fine-tuning and on the AFW benchmark without fine-tuning. The proposed method obtains very competitive state-of-the-art performance in the two benchmarks. We present a deep learning approach for high resolution face completion with multiple controllable attributes (e.g., male and smiling) under arbitrary masks. Face completion entails understanding both structural meaningfulness and appearance consistency locally and globally to fill in "holes" whose content do not appear elsewhere in an input image. It is a challenging task with the difficulty level increasing significantly with respect to high resolution, the complexity of "holes" and the controllable attributes of filled-in fragments. Our system addresses the challenges by learning a fully end-to-end framework that trains generative adversarial networks (GANs) progressively from low resolution to high resolution with conditional vectors encoding controllable attributes. We design novel network architectures to exploit information across multiple scales effectively and efficiently. We introduce new loss functions encouraging sharp completion. We show that our system can complete faces with large structural and appearance variations using a single feed-forward pass of computation with mean inference time of 0.007 seconds for images at 1024 x 1024 resolution. We also perform a pilot human study that shows our approach outperforms state-of-the-art face completion methods in terms of rank analysis. The code will be released upon publication. This paper explores multi-task learning (MTL) for face recognition. First, we propose a multi-task convolutional neural network (CNN) for face recognition, where identity classification is the main task and pose, illumination, and expression (PIE) estimations are the side tasks. Second, we develop a dynamic-weighting scheme to automatically assign the loss weights to each side task, which solves the crucial problem of balancing between different tasks in MTL. Third, we propose a pose-directed multi-task CNN by grouping different poses to learn pose-specific identity features, simultaneously across all poses in a joint framework. Last but not least, we propose an energy-based weight analysis method to explore how CNN-based MTL works. We observe that the side tasks serve as regularizations to disentangle the PIE variations from the learnt identity features. Extensive experiments on the entire multi-PIE dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work using all data in multi-PIE for face recognition. Our approach is also applicable to in-the-wild data sets for pose-invariant face recognition and achieves comparable or better performance than state of the art on LFW, CFP, and IJB-A datasets. This paper concerns the problem of facial landmark detection. We provide a unique new analysis of the features produced at intermediate layers of a convolutional neural network (CNN) trained to regress facial landmark coordinates. This analysis shows that while being processed by the CNN, face images can be partitioned in an unsupervised manner into subsets containing faces in similar poses (i.e., 3D views) and facial properties (e.g., presence or absence of eye-wear). Based on this finding, we describe a novel CNN architecture, specialized to regress the facial landmark coordinates of faces in specific poses and appearances. To address the shortage of training data, particularly in extreme profile poses, we additionally present data augmentation techniques designed to provide sufficient training examples for each of these specialized sub-networks. The proposed Tweaked CNN (TCNN) architecture is shown to outperform existing landmark detection methods in an extensive battery of tests on the AFW, ALFW, and 300W benchmarks. Finally, to promote reproducibility of our results, we make code and trained models publicly available through our project webpage. Large pose variations remain to be a challenge that confronts real-word face detection. We propose a new cascaded Convolutional Neural Network, dubbed the name Supervised Transformer Network, to address this challenge. The first stage is a multi-task Region Proposal Network (RPN), which simultaneously predicts candidate face regions along with associated facial landmarks. The candidate regions are then warped by mapping the detected facial landmarks to their canonical positions to better normalize the face patterns. The second stage, which is a RCNN, then verifies if the warped candidate regions are valid faces or not. We conduct end-to-end learning of the cascaded network, including optimizing the canonical positions of the facial landmarks. This supervised learning of the transformations automatically selects the best scale to differentiate face non-face patterns. By combining feature maps from both stages of the network, we achieve state-of-the-art detection accuracies on several public benchmarks. For real-time performance, we run the cascaded network only on regions of interests produced from a boosting cascade face detector. Our detector runs at 30 FPS on a single CPU core for a VGA-resolution image. Most modern face recognition systems rely on a feature representation given by a hand-crafted image descriptor, such as Local Binary Patterns (LBP), and achieve improved performance by combining several such representations. In this paper, we propose deep learning as a natural source for obtaining additional, complementary representations. To learn features in high-resolution images, we make use of convolutional deep belief networks. Moreover, to take advantage of global structure in an object class, we develop local convolutional restricted Boltzmann machines, a novel convolutional learning model that exploits the global structure by not assuming stationarity of features across the image, while maintaining scalability and robustness to small misalignments. We also present a novel application of deep learning to descriptors other than pixel intensity values, such as LBP. In addition, we compare performance of networks trained using unsupervised learning against networks with random filters, and empirically show that learning weights not only is necessary for obtaining good multilayer representations, but also provides robustness to the choice of the network architecture parameters. Finally, we show that a recognition system using only representations obtained from deep learning can achieve comparable accuracy with a system using a combination of hand-crafted image descriptors. Moreover, by combining these representations, we achieve state-of-the-art results on a real-world face verification database. Recent years have witnessed promising results of face detection using deep learning, especially for the family of region-based convolutional neural networks (R-CNN) methods and their variants. Despite making remarkable progresses, face detection in the wild remains an open research challenge especially when detecting faces at vastly different scales and characteristics. In this paper, we propose a novel framework of "Feature Agglomeration Networks" (FAN) to build a new single stage face detector, which not only achieves state-of-the-art performance but also runs efficiently. As inspired by the recent success of Feature Pyramid Networks (FPN) lin2016fpn for generic object detection, the core idea of our framework is to exploit inherent multi-scale features of a single convolutional neural network to detect faces of varied scales and characteristics by aggregating higher-level semantic feature maps of different scales as contextual cues to augment lower-level feature maps via a hierarchical agglomeration manner at marginal extra computation cost. Unlike the existing FPN approach, we construct our FAN architecture using a new Agglomerative Connection module and further propose a Hierarchical Loss to effectively train the FAN model. We evaluate the proposed FAN detector on several public face detection benchmarks and achieved new state-of-the-art results with real-time detection speed on GPU. Attribute recognition, particularly facial, extracts many labels for each image. While some multi-task vision problems can be decomposed into separate tasks and stages, e.g., training independent models for each task, for a growing set of problems joint optimization across all tasks has been shown to improve performance. We show that for deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) facial attribute extraction, multi-task optimization is better. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to apply joint optimization to DCNNs when training data is imbalanced, and re-balancing multi-label data directly is structurally infeasible, since adding removing data to balance one label will change the sampling of the other labels. This paper addresses the multi-label imbalance problem by introducing a novel mixed objective optimization network (MOON) with a loss function that mixes multiple task objectives with domain adaptive re-weighting of propagated loss. Experiments demonstrate that not only does MOON advance the state of the art in facial attribute recognition, but it also outperforms independently trained DCNNs using the same data. When using facial attributes for the LFW face recognition task, we show that our balanced (domain adapted) network outperforms the unbalanced trained network. Facial landmark detection of face alignment has long been impeded by the problems of occlusion and pose variation. Instead of treating the detection task as a single and independent problem, we investigate the possibility of improving detection robustness through multitask learning. Specifically, we wish to optimize facial landmark detection together with heterogeneous but subtly correlated tasks, e.g. head pose estimation and facial attribute inference. This is non-trivial since different tasks have different learning difficulties and convergence rates. To address this problem, we formulate a novel tasks-constrained deep model, with task-wise early stopping to facilitate learning convergence. Extensive evaluations show that the proposed task-constrained learning (i) outperforms existing methods, especially in dealing with faces with severe occlusion and pose variation, and (ii) reduces model complexity drastically compared to the state-of-the-art method based on cascaded deep model [29]. In this technical report, we extend the method presented in our ECCV 2014 [39] paper to handle more landmark points (68 points instead of 5 major facial points) without either redesigning the deep model or involving significant increase in run time cost. This is made possible by transferring the learned 5-point model to the desired facial landmark configuration, through model fine-tuning with dense landmark annotations. Our new model achieves the state-of-the-art result on the 300-W benchmark dataset (mean error of 9.15 on the challenging IBUG subset). Predicting face attributes in the wild is challenging due to complex face variations. We propose a novel deep learning framework for attribute prediction in the wild. It cascades two CNNs, LNet and ANet, which are fine-tuned jointly with attribute tags, but pre-trained differently. LNet is pre-trained by massive general object categories for face localization, while ANet is pre-trained by massive face identities for attribute prediction. This framework not only outperforms the state-of-the-art with a large margin, but also reveals valuable facts on learning face representation. (1) It shows how the performances of face localization (LNet) and attribute prediction (ANet) can be improved by different pre-training strategies. (2) It reveals that although the filters of LNet are fine-tuned only with image-level attribute tags, their response maps over entire images have strong indication of face locations. This fact enables training LNet for face localization with only image-level annotations, but without face bounding boxes or landmarks, which are required by all attribute recognition works. (3) It also demonstrates that the high-level hidden neurons of ANet automatically discover semantic concepts after pre-training with massive face identities, and such concepts are significantly enriched after fine-tuning with attribute tags. Each attribute can be well explained with a sparse linear combination of these concepts. The ability to rank the images based on their appearance finds many real-world applications, such as image retrieval or image album creation. Despite the recent dominance of deep learning methods in computer vision which often result in superior performance, they are not always the methods of choice because they lack interpretability. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of improving the image aesthetic inference of the convolutional neural networks with hand-designed features that rely on domain expertise in various fields. We perform a comparison of hand-crafted feature sets in their ability to predict fine-grained aesthetics scores on two image aesthetics data sets. We observe that even feature sets published earlier are able to compete with more recently published algorithms and, by combining the algorithms, a significant improvement in predicting image aesthetics is possible. By using a tree-based learner, we perform the feature elimination to understand the best performing features overall and across different image categories. Only roughly 15 and 8 of the features are needed to achieve full performance in predicting a fine-grained aesthetic score and binary classification, respectively. By combining the hand-crafted features with metafeatures that predict the quality of an image based on convolutional neural network features, the model performs better than a baseline VGG16 model. One can, however, achieve more significant improvement in both aesthetics score prediction and binary classification by fusing the hand-crafted features and the penultimate layer activations. Our experiments indicate an improvement up to 2.2 achieving current state-of-the-art binary classification accuracy on the aesthetic visual analysis data set when the hand-designed features are fused with activations from VGG16 and ResNet50 networks. Though having achieved some progresses, the hand-crafted texture features, e.g., LBP [23], LBP-TOP [11] are still unable to capture the most discriminative cues between genuine and fake faces. In this paper, instead of designing feature by ourselves, we rely on the deep convolutional neural network (CNN) to learn features of high discriminative ability in a supervised manner. Combined with some data pre-processing, the face anti-spoofing performance improves drastically. In the experiments, over 70 relative decrease of Half Total Error Rate (HTER) is achieved on two challenging datasets, CASIA [36] and REPLAY-ATTACK [7] compared with the state-of-the-art. Meanwhile, the experimental results from inter-tests between two datasets indicates CNN can obtain features with better generalization ability. Moreover, the nets trained using combined data from two datasets have less biases between two datasets. The way people look in terms of facial attributes (ethnicity, hair color, facial hair, etc.) and the clothes or accessories they wear (sunglasses, hat, hoodies, etc.) is highly dependent on geo-location and weather condition, respectively. This work explores, for the first time, the use of this contextual information, as people with wearable cameras walk across different neighborhoods of a city, in order to learn a rich feature representation for facial attribute classification, without the costly manual annotation required by previous methods. By tracking the faces of casual walkers on more than 40 hours of egocentric video, we are able to cover tens of thousands of different identities and automatically extract nearly 5 million pairs of images connected by or from different face tracks, along with their weather and location context, under pose and lighting variations. These image pairs are then fed into a deep network that preserves similarity of images connected by the same track, in order to capture identity-related attribute features, and optimizes for location and weather prediction to capture additional facial attribute features. Finally, the network is fine-tuned with manually annotated samples. We perform an extensive experimental analysis on wearable data and two standard benchmark datasets based on web images (LFWA and CelebA). Our method outperforms by a large margin a network trained from scratch. Moreover, even without using manually annotated identity labels for pre-training as in previous methods, our approach achieves results that are better than the state of the art. The way people look in terms of facial attributes (ethnicity, hair color, facial hair, etc.) and the clothes or accessories they wear (sunglasses, hat, hoodies, etc.) is highly dependent on geo-location and weather condition, respectively. This work explores, for the first time, the use of this contextual information, as people with wearable cameras walk across different neighborhoods of a city, in order to learn a rich feature representation for facial attribute classification, without the costly manual annotation required by previous methods. By tracking the faces of casual walkers on more than 40 hours of egocentric video, we are able to cover tens of thousands of different identities and automatically extract nearly 5 million pairs of images connected by or from different face tracks, along with their weather and location context, under pose and lighting variations. These image pairs are then fed into a deep network that preserves similarity of images connected by the same track, in order to capture identity-related attribute features, and optimizes for location and weather prediction to capture additional facial attribute features. Finally, the network is fine-tuned with manually annotated samples. We perform an extensive experimental analysis on wearable data and two standard benchmark datasets based on web images (LFWA and CelebA). Our method outperforms by a large margin a network trained from scratch. Moreover, even without using manually annotated identity labels for pre-training as in previous methods, our approach achieves results that are better than the state of the art. Recent works have shown that facial attributes are useful in a number of applications such as face recognition and retrieval. However, estimating attributes in images with large variations remains a big challenge. This challenge is addressed in this paper. Unlike existing methods that assume the independence of attributes during their estimation, our approach captures the interdependencies of local regions for each attribute, as well as the high-order correlations between different attributes, which makes it more robust to occlusions and misdetection of face regions. First, we have modeled region interdependencies with a discriminative decision tree, where each node consists of a detector and a classifier trained on a local region. The detector allows us to locate the region, while the classifier determines the presence or absence of an attribute. Second, correlations of attributes and attribute predictors are modeled by organizing all of the decision trees into a large sum-product network (SPN), which is learned by the EM algorithm and yields the most probable explanation (MPE) of the facial attributes in terms of the region's localization and classification. Experimental results on a large data set with 22,400 images show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.