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.
Our framework can be categorized as multi-task learning @cite_4 @cite_1 , which shares the information and explores the similarity of related tasks on the same data. The multi-task learning can facilitate a wide range of tasks and applications, including but not limited to action recognition @cite_10 , information retrieval @cite_28 , facial landmark detection @cite_22 @cite_33 , and facial attribute prediction @cite_19 @cite_35 @cite_0 @cite_3 @cite_27 . The recent technical report @cite_33 also combine face detection with the tasks of locating face landmarks and recognizing gender. However, unlike our facial attribute prediction on the images in the wild, their work still has to firstly detect face regions for the facial landmarks and predicting gender.
@cite_35 @cite_4 @cite_22 @cite_33 @cite_28 @cite_1 @cite_3 @cite_0 @cite_19 @cite_27 @cite_10
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In this study, we show that landmark detection or face alignment task is not a single and independent problem. Instead, its robustness can be greatly improved with auxiliary information. Specifically, we jointly optimize landmark detection together with the recognition of heterogeneous but subtly correlated facial attributes, such as gender, expression, and appearance attributes. This is non-trivial since different attribute inference tasks have different learning difficulties and convergence rates. To address this problem, we formulate a novel tasks-constrained deep model, which not only learns the inter-task correlation but also employs dynamic task coefficients to facilitate the optimization convergence when learning multiple complex tasks. Extensive evaluations show that the proposed task-constrained learning (i) outperforms existing face alignment 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 methods based on cascaded deep model. 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. Visual attributes, from simple objects (e.g., backpacks, hats) to soft-biometrics (e.g., gender, height, clothing) have proven to be a powerful representational approach for many applications such as image description and human identification. In this paper, we introduce a novel method to combine the advantages of both multi-task and curriculum learning in a visual attribute classification framework. Individual tasks are grouped based on their correlation so that two groups of strongly and weakly correlated tasks are formed. The two groups of tasks are learned in a curriculum learning setup by transferring the acquired knowledge from the strongly to the weakly correlated. The learning process within each group though, is performed in a multi-task classification setup. The proposed method learns better and converges faster than learning all the tasks in a typical multi-task learning paradigm. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the publicly available, SoBiR, VIPeR and PETA datasets and report state-of-the-art results across the board. Facial landmark detection 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 multi-task 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 [21]. Multiview face detection is a challenging problem due to dramatic appearance changes under various pose, illumination and expression conditions. In this paper, we present a multi-task deep learning scheme to enhance the detection performance. More specifically, we build a deep convolutional neural network that can simultaneously learn the face nonface decision, the face pose estimation problem, and the facial landmark localization problem. We show that such a multi-task learning scheme can further improve the classifier's accuracy. On the challenging FDDB data set, our detector achieves over 3 improvement in detection rate at the same false positive rate compared with other state-of-the-art methods. 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. We present a multi-purpose algorithm for simultaneous face detection, face alignment, pose estimation, gender recognition, smile detection, age estimation and face recognition using a single deep convolutional neural network (CNN). The proposed method employs a multi-task learning framework that regularizes the shared parameters of CNN and builds a synergy among different domains and tasks. Extensive experiments show that the network has a better understanding of face and achieves state-of-the-art result for most of these tasks. 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). Detecting faces in uncontrolled environments continues to be a challenge to traditional face detection methods due to the large variation in facial appearances, as well as occlusion and clutter. In order to overcome these challenges, we present a novel and robust exemplar-based face detector that integrates image retrieval and discriminative learning. A large database of faces with bounding rectangles and facial landmark locations is collected, and simple discriminative classifiers are learned from each of them. A voting-based method is then proposed to let these classifiers cast votes on the test image through an efficient image retrieval technique. As a result, faces can be very efficiently detected by selecting the modes from the voting maps, without resorting to exhaustive sliding window-style scanning. Moreover, due to the exemplar-based framework, our approach can detect faces under challenging conditions without explicitly modeling their variations. Evaluation on two public benchmark datasets shows that our new face detection approach is accurate and efficient, and achieves the state-of-the-art performance. We further propose to use image retrieval for face validation (in order to remove false positives) and for face alignment landmark localization. The same methodology can also be easily generalized to other face-related tasks, such as attribute recognition, as well as general object detection. This paper proposes a joint multi-task learning algorithm to better predict attributes in images using deep convolutional neural networks (CNN). We consider learning binary semantic attributes through a multi-task CNN model, where each CNN will predict one binary attribute. The multi-task learning allows CNN models to simultaneously share visual knowledge among different attribute categories. Each CNN will generate attribute-specific feature representations, and then we apply multi-task learning on the features to predict their attributes. In our multi-task framework, we propose a method to decompose the overall model’s parameters into a latent task matrix and combination matrix. Furthermore, under-sampled classifiers can leverage shared statistics from other classifiers to improve their performance. Natural grouping of attributes is applied such that attributes in the same group are encouraged to share more knowledge. Meanwhile, attributes in different groups will generally compete with each other, and consequently share less knowledge. We show the effectiveness of our method on two popular attribute datasets. Face detection and alignment in unconstrained environment are challenging due to various poses, illuminations, and occlusions. Recent studies show that deep learning approaches can achieve impressive performance on these two tasks. In this letter, we propose a deep cascaded multitask framework that exploits the inherent correlation between detection and alignment to boost up their performance. In particular, our framework leverages a cascaded architecture with three stages of carefully designed deep convolutional networks to predict face and landmark location in a coarse-to-fine manner. In addition, we propose a new online hard sample mining strategy that further improves the performance in practice. Our method achieves superior accuracy over the state-of-the-art techniques on the challenging face detection dataset and benchmark and WIDER FACE benchmarks for face detection, and annotated facial landmarks in the wild benchmark for face alignment, while keeps real-time performance.