Describable visual facial attributes are now commonplace in human biometrics and affective computing, with existing algorithms even reaching a sufficient point of maturity for placement into commercial products. These algorithms model objective facets of facial appearance, such as hair and eye color, expression, and aspects of the geometry of the face. A natural extension, which has not been studied to any great extent thus far, is the ability to model subjective attributes that are assigned to a face based purely on visual judgements. For instance, with just a glance, our first impression of a face may lead us to believe that a person is smart, worthy of our trust, and perhaps even our admiration - regardless of the underlying truth behind such attributes. Psychologists believe that these judgements are based on a variety of factors such as emotional states, personality traits, and other physiognomic cues. But work in this direction leads to an interesting question: how do we create models for problems where there is no ground truth, only measurable behavior? In this paper, we introduce a new convolutional neural network-based regression framework that allows us to train predictive models of crowd behavior for social attribute assignment. Over images from the AFLW face database, these models demonstrate strong correlations with human crowd ratings.
We propose to shift the goal of recognition from naming to describing. Doing so allows us not only to name familiar objects, but also: to report unusual aspects of a familiar object (“spotty dog”, not just “dog”); to say something about unfamiliar objects (“hairy and four-legged”, not just “unknown”); and to learn how to recognize new objects with few or no visual examples. Rather than focusing on identity assignment, we make inferring attributes the core problem of recognition. These attributes can be semantic (“spotty”) or discriminative (“dogs have it but sheep do not”). Learning attributes presents a major new challenge: generalization across object categories, not just across instances within a category. In this paper, we also introduce a novel feature selection method for learning attributes that generalize well across categories. We support our claims by thorough evaluation that provides insights into the limitations of the standard recognition paradigm of naming and demonstrates the new abilities provided by our attribute-based framework.  We propose a novel approach for ranking and retrieval of images based on multi-attribute queries. Existing image retrieval methods train separate classifiers for each word and heuristically combine their outputs for retrieving multiword queries. Moreover, these approaches also ignore the interdependencies among the query terms. In contrast, we propose a principled approach for multi-attribute retrieval which explicitly models the correlations that are present between the attributes. Given a multi-attribute query, we also utilize other attributes in the vocabulary which are not present in the query, for ranking retrieval. Furthermore, we integrate ranking and retrieval within the same formulation, by posing them as structured prediction problems. Extensive experimental evaluation on the Labeled Faces in the Wild(LFW), FaceTracer and PASCAL VOC datasets show that our approach significantly outperforms several state-of-the-art ranking and retrieval methods. We study the problem of object classification when training and test classes are disjoint, i.e. no training examples of the target classes are available. This setup has hardly been studied in computer vision research, but it is the rule rather than the exception, because the world contains tens of thousands of different object classes and for only a very few of them image, collections have been formed and annotated with suitable class labels. In this paper, we tackle the problem by introducing attribute-based classification. It performs object detection based on a human-specified high-level description of the target objects instead of training images. The description consists of arbitrary semantic attributes, like shape, color or even geographic information. Because such properties transcend the specific learning task at hand, they can be pre-learned, e.g. from image datasets unrelated to the current task. Afterwards, new classes can be detected based on their attribute representation, without the need for a new training phase. In order to evaluate our method and to facilitate research in this area, we have assembled a new large-scale dataset, “Animals with Attributes”, of over 30,000 animal images that match the 50 classes in Osherson's classic table of how strongly humans associate 85 semantic attributes with animal classes. Our experiments show that by using an attribute layer it is indeed possible to build a learning object detection system that does not require any training images of the target classes. Recent work has shown that visual attributes are a powerful approach for applications such as recognition, image description and retrieval. However, fusing multiple attribute scores — as required during multi-attribute queries or similarity searches — presents a significant challenge. Scores from different attribute classifiers cannot be combined in a simple way; the same score for different attributes can mean different things. In this work, we show how to construct normalized “multi-attribute spaces” from raw classifier outputs, using techniques based on the statistical Extreme Value Theory. Our method calibrates each raw score to a probability that the given attribute is present in the image. We describe how these probabilities can be fused in a simple way to perform more accurate multiattribute searches, as well as enable attribute-based similarity searches. A significant advantage of our approach is that the normalization is done after-the-fact, requiring neither modification to the attribute classification system nor ground truth attribute annotations. We demonstrate results on a large data set of nearly 2 million face images and show significant improvements over prior work. We also show that perceptual similarity of search results increases by using contextual attributes. 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.