We consider the problem of face swapping in images, where an input identity is transformed into a target identity while preserving pose, facial expression, and lighting. To perform this mapping, we use convolutional neural networks trained to capture the appearance of the target identity from an unstructured collection of his her photographs.This approach is enabled by framing the face swapping problem in terms of style transfer, where the goal is to render an image in the style of another one. Building on recent advances in this area, we devise a new loss function that enables the network to produce highly photorealistic results. By combining neural networks with simple pre- and post-processing steps, we aim at making face swap work in real-time with no input from the user.
Bitouk al @cite_20 , for example, automatically substituted an input face by another face selected from a large database of images based on the similarity of appearance and pose. The method replaces the eyes, nose, and mouth of the face and further makes color and illumination adjustments in order to blend the two faces. This design has two major limitations which we address in this paper: there is no control over the output identity and the expression of the input face is altered.
@cite_20
2083192529 2136407193 2166335841 2060312700
In this paper, we present a complete system for automatic face replacement in images. Our system uses a large library of face images created automatically by downloading images from the internet, extracting faces using face detection software, and aligning each extracted face to a common coordinate system. This library is constructed off-line, once, and can be efficiently accessed during face replacement. Our replacement algorithm has three main stages. First, given an input image, we detect all faces that are present, align them to the coordinate system used by our face library, and select candidate face images from our face library that are similar to the input face in appearance and pose. Second, we adjust the pose, lighting, and color of the candidate face images to match the appearance of those in the input image, and seamlessly blend in the results. Third, we rank the blended candidate replacements by computing a match distance over the overlap region. Our approach requires no 3D model, is fully automatic, and generates highly plausible results across a wide range of skin tones, lighting conditions, and viewpoints. We show how our approach can be used for a variety of applications including face de-identification and the creation of appealing group photographs from a set of images. We conclude with a user study that validates the high quality of our replacement results, and a discussion on the current limitations of our system. Automatically locating multiple feature points (i.e., the shape) in a facial image and then synthesizing the corresponding facial sketch are highly challenging since facial images typically exhibit a wide range of poses, expressions, and scales, and have differing degrees of illumination and or occlusion. When the facial sketches are to be synthesized in the unique sketching style of a particular artist, the problem becomes even more complex. To resolve these problems, this paper develops an automatic facial sketch synthesis system based on a novel direct combined model (DCM) algorithm. The proposed system executes three cascaded procedures, namely, (1) synthesis of the facial shape from the input texture information (i.e., the facial image); (2) synthesis of the exaggerated facial shape from the synthesized facial shape; and (3) synthesis of a sketch from the original input image and the synthesized exaggerated shape. Previous proposals for reconstructing facial shapes and synthesizing the corresponding facial sketches are heavily reliant on the quality of the texture reconstruction results, which, in turn, are highly sensitive to occlusion and lighting effects in the input image. However, the DCM approach proposed in this paper accurately reconstructs the facial shape and then produces lifelike synthesized facial sketches without the need to recover occluded feature points or to restore the texture information lost as a result of unfavorable lighting conditions. Moreover, the DCM approach is capable of synthesizing facial sketches from input images with a wide variety of facial poses, gaze directions, and facial expressions even when such images are not included within the original training data set. We present a fully automatic face recognition algorithm and demonstrate its performance on the FRGC v2.0 data. Our algorithm is multimodal (2D and 3D) and performs hybrid (feature based and holistic) matching in order to achieve efficiency and robustness to facial expressions. The pose of a 3D face along with its texture is automatically corrected using a novel approach based on a single automatically detected point and the Hotelling transform. A novel 3D spherical face representation (SFR) is used in conjunction with the scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) descriptor to form a rejection classifier, which quickly eliminates a large number of candidate faces at an early stage for efficient recognition in case of large galleries. The remaining faces are then verified using a novel region-based matching approach, which is robust to facial expressions. This approach automatically segments the eyes- forehead and the nose regions, which are relatively less sensitive to expressions and matches them separately using a modified iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm. The results of all the matching engines are fused at the metric level to achieve higher accuracy. We use the FRGC benchmark to compare our results to other algorithms that used the same database. Our multimodal hybrid algorithm performed better than others by achieving 99.74 percent and 98.31 percent verification rates at a 0.001 false acceptance rate (FAR) and identification rates of 99.02 percent and 95.37 percent for probes with a neutral and a nonneutral expression, respectively. This paper exploits the discriminative power of manifold learning in conjunction with the parsimonious power of sparse signal representation to perform robust facial expression recognition. By utilizing an l1 reconstruction error and a statistical mixture model, both accuracy and tolerance to occlusion improve without the need to perform neutral frame subtraction. Initially facial features are mapped onto a low dimensional manifold using supervised Locality Preserving Projections. Then an l1 optimization is employed to relate surface projections to training exemplars, where reconstruction models on facial regions determine the expression class. Experimental procedures and results are done in accordance with the recently published extended Cohn-Kanade and GEMEP-FERA datasets. Results demonstrate that posed datasets overemphasize the mouth region, while spontaneous datasets rely more on the upper cheek and eye regions. Despite these differences, the proposed method overcomes previous limitations to using sparse methods for facial expression and produces state-of-the-art results on both types of datasets.