mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Efficient PSD Constrained Asymmetric Metric Learning for Person Re-Identification
Authors: Shengcai Liao, Stan Z. Li
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Person re-identification is becoming a hot research topic due to its value in both machine learning research and video surveillance applications. For this challenging problem, distance metric learning is shown to be effective in matching person images. However, existing approaches either require a heavy computation due to the positive semidefinite (PSD) constraint, or ignore the PSD constraint and learn a free distance function that makes the learned metric potentially noisy. We argue that the PSD constraint provides a useful regularization to smooth the solution of the metric, and hence the learned metric is more robust than without the PSD constraint. Another problem with metric learning algorithms is that the number of positive sample pairs is very limited, and the learning process is largely dominated by the large amount of negative sample pairs. To address the above issues, we derive a logistic metric learning approach with the PSD constraint and an asymmetric sample weighting strategy. Besides, we successfully apply the accelerated proximal gradient approach to find a global minimum solution of the proposed formulation, with a convergence rate of O(1/t^2) where t is the number of iterations. The proposed algorithm termed MLAPG is shown to be computationally efficient and able to perform low rank selection. We applied the proposed method for person re-identification, achieving state-of-the-art performance on four challenging databases (VIPeR, QMUL GRID, CUHK Campus, and CUHK03), compared to existing metric learning methods as well as published results.
Pose-Invariant 3D Face Alignment
Authors: Amin Jourabloo, Xiaoming Liu
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Face alignment aims to estimate the locations of a set of landmarks for a given image.This problem has received much attention as evidenced by the recent advancement in both the methodology and performance. However, most of the existing works neither explicitly handle face images with arbitrary poses, nor perform large-scale experiments on non-frontal and profile face images. In order to address these limitations, this paper proposes a novel face alignment algorithm that estimates both 2D and 3D landmarks and their 2D visibilities for a face image with an arbitrary pose. By integrating a 3D point distribution model, a cascaded coupled-regressor approach is designed to estimate both the camera projection matrix and the 3D landmarks.  Furthermore, the 3D model also allows us to automatically estimate the 2D landmark visibilities via surface normal. We use a substantially larger collection of all-pose face images to evaluate our algorithm and demonstrate superior performances than the state-of-the-art methods.
From Emotions to Action Units With Hidden and Semi-Hidden-Task Learning
Authors: Adria Ruiz, Joost Van de Weijer, Xavier Binefa
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Limited annotated training data is a challenging problem in Action Unit recognition. In this paper, we investigate how the use of large databases labelled according to the 6 universal facial expressions can increase the generalization ability of Action Unit classifiers. For this purpose, we propose a novel learning framework: Hidden-Task Learning. HTL aims to learn a set of Hidden-Tasks (Action Units) for which samples are not available but, in contrast, training data is easier to obtain from a set of related Visible-Tasks (Facial Expressions). To that end, HTL is able to exploit prior knowledge about the relation between Hidden and Visible-Tasks. In our case, we base this prior knowledge on empirical psychological studies providing statistical correlations between Action Units and universal facial expressions. Additionally, we extend HTL to Semi-Hidden Task Learning (SHTL) assuming that Action Unit training samples are also provided. Performing exhaustive experiments over four different datasets, we show that HTL and SHTL improve the generalization ability of AU classifiers by training them with additional facial expression data. Additionally, we show that SHTL achieves competitive performance compared with state-of-the-art Transductive Learning approaches which face the problem of limited training data by using unlabelled test samples during training.
Automated Facial Trait Judgment and Election Outcome Prediction: Social Dimensions of Face
Authors: Jungseock Joo, Francis F. Steen, Song-Chun Zhu
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: The human face is a primary medium of human communication and a prominent source of information used to infer various attributes. In this paper, we study a fully automated system that can infer the perceived traits of a person from his face -- social dimensions, such as "intelligence," "honesty," and "competence" -- and how those traits can be used to predict the outcomes of real-world social events that involve long-term commitments, such as political elections, job hires, and marriage engagements. To this end, we propose a hierarchical model for enduring traits inferred from faces, incorporating high-level perceptions and intermediate-level attributes.  We show that our trained model can successfully classify the outcomes of two important political events, only using the photographs of politicians' faces. Firstly, it classifies the winners of a series of recent U.S. elections with the accuracy of 67.9% (Governors) and 65.5% (Senators). We also reveal that the different political offices require different types of preferred traits. Secondly, our model can categorize the political party affiliations of politicians, i.e., Democrats vs. Republicans, with the accuracy of 62.6% (male) and 60.1% (female). To the best of our knowledge, our paper is the first to use automated visual trait analysis to predict the outcomes of real-world social events. This approach is more scalable and objective than the prior behavioral studies, and opens for a range of new applications.
Simultaneous Local Binary Feature Learning and Encoding for Face Recognition
Authors: Jiwen Lu, Venice Erin Liong, Jie Zhou
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a simultaneous local binary feature learning and encoding (SLBFLE) method for face recognition. Different from existing hand-crafted face descriptors such as local binary pattern (LBP) and Gabor features which require strong prior knowledge, our SLBFLE is an unsupervised feature learning approach which is automatically learned from raw pixels. Unlike existing binary face descriptors such as the LBP and discriminant face descriptor (DFD) which use a two-stage feature extraction approach, our SLBFLE jointly learns binary codes for local face patches and the codebook for feature encoding so that discriminative information from raw pixels can be simultaneously learned with a one-stage procedure. Experimental results on four widely used face datasets including LFW, YouTube Face (YTF), FERET and PaSC clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild
Authors: Ziwei Liu, Ping Luo, Xiaogang Wang, Xiaoou Tang
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: 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.
Multi-Task Learning With Low Rank Attribute Embedding for Person Re-Identification
Authors: Chi Su, Fan Yang, Shiliang Zhang, Qi Tian, Larry S. Davis, Wen Gao
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: We propose a novel Multi-Task Learning with Low Rank Attribute Embedding (MTL-LORAE) framework for person re-identification. Re-identifications from multiple cameras are regarded as related tasks to exploit shared information to improve re-identification accuracy. Both low level features and semantic/data-driven attributes are utilized. Since attributes are generally correlated, we introduce a low rank attribute embedding into the MTL formulation to embed original binary attributes to a continuous attribute space, where incorrect and incomplete attributes are rectified and recovered to better describe people. The learning objective function consists of a quadratic loss regarding class labels and an attribute embedding error, which is solved by an alternating optimization procedure. Experiments on three person re-identification datasets have demonstrated that MTL-LORAE outperforms existing approaches by a large margin and produces state-of-the-art results.
Regressing a 3D Face Shape From a Single Image
Authors: Sergey Tulyakov, Nicu Sebe
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: In this work we present a method to estimate a 3D face shape from a single image. Our method is based on a cascade regression framework that directly estimates face landmarks locations in 3D. We include the knowledge that a face is a 3D object into the learning pipeline and show how this information decreases localization errors while keeping the computational time low. We predict the actual positions of the landmarks even if they are occluded due to face rotation. To support the ability of our method to reliably reconstruct 3D shapes, we introduce a simple method for head pose estimation using a single image that reaches higher accuracy than the state of the art. Comparison of 3D face landmarks localization with the available state of the art further supports the feasibility of a single-step face shape estimation. The code, trained models and our 3D annotations will be made available to the research community.
Rendering of Eyes for Eye-Shape Registration and Gaze Estimation
Authors: Erroll Wood, Tadas Baltrusaitis, Xucong Zhang, Yusuke Sugano, Peter Robinson, Andreas Bulling
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Images of the eye are key in several computer vision problems, such as shape registration and gaze estimation. Recent large-scale supervised methods for these problems require time-consuming data collection and manual annotation, which can be unreliable. We propose synthesizing perfectly labelled photo-realistic training data in a fraction of the time. We used computer graphics techniques to build a collection of dynamic eye-region models from head scan geometry. These were randomly posed to synthesize close-up eye images for a wide range of head poses, gaze directions, and illumination conditions. We used our model's controllability to verify the importance of realistic illumination and shape variations in eye-region training data. Finally, we demonstrate the benefits of our synthesized training data (SynthesEyes) by out-performing state-of-the-art methods for eye-shape registration as well as cross-dataset appearance-based gaze estimation in the wild.
Multi-Scale Learning for Low-Resolution Person Re-Identification
Authors: Xiang Li, Wei-Shi Zheng, Xiaojuan Wang, Tao Xiang, Shaogang Gong
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: In real world person re-identification (re-id), images of people captured at very different resolutions from different locations need be matched. Existing re-id models typically normalise all person images to the same size. However, a low-resolution (LR) image contains much less information about a person, and direct image scaling and simple size normalisation as done in conventional re-id methods cannot compensate for the loss of information. To solve this LR person re-id problem, we propose a novel joint multi-scale learning framework, termed joint multi-scale discriminant component analysis (JUDEA). The key component of this framework is a heterogeneous class mean discrepancy (HCMD) criterion for cross-scale image domain alignment, which is optimised simultaneously with discriminant modelling across multiple scales in the joint learning framework. Our experiments show that the proposed JUDEA framework outperforms existing representative re-id methods as well as other related LR visual matching models applied for the LR person re-id problem.
Learning to Transfer: Transferring Latent Task Structures and Its Application to Person-Specific Facial Action Unit Detection
Authors: Timur Almaev, Brais Martinez, Michel Valstar
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: In this article we explore the problem of constructing person-specific models for the detection of facial Action Units (AUs), addressing the problem from the point of view of Transfer Learning and Multi-Task Learning. Our starting point is the fact that some expressions, such as smiles, are very easily elicited, annotated, and automatically detected, while others are much harder to elicit and to annotate. We thus consider a novel problem:  all AU models for the target subject are to be learnt using person-specific annotated data for a reference AU (AU12 in our case), and no data or little data regarding the target AU. In order to design such a model, we propose a novel Multi-Task Learning and the associated Transfer Learning framework, in which we consider both relations across subjects and  AUs. That is to say, we consider a tensor structure among the tasks. Our approach hinges on learning the latent relations among tasks using one single reference AU, and then transferring these latent relations to other AUs. We show that we are able to effectively make use of the annotated data for AU12 when learning other person-specific AU models, even in the absence of data for the target task. Finally, we show the excellent performance of our method when small amounts of annotated data for the target tasks are made available.
Pairwise Conditional Random Forests for Facial Expression Recognition
Authors: Arnaud Dapogny, Kevin Bailly, Severine Dubuisson
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Facial expression can be seen as the dynamic variation of one's appearance over time. Successful recognition thus involves finding representations of high-dimensional spatiotemporal patterns that can be generalized to unseen facial morphologies and variations of the expression dynamics. In this paper, we propose to learn Random Forests from heterogeneous derivative features (e.g. facial fiducial point movements or texture variations) upon pairs of images. Those forests are conditioned on the expression label of the first frame to reduce the variability of the ongoing expression transitions. When testing on a specific frame of a video, pairs are created between this frame and the previous ones. Predictions for each previous frame are used to draw trees from Pairwise Conditional Random Forests (PCRF) whose pairwise outputs are averaged over time to produce robust estimates. As such, PCRF appears as a natural extension of Random Forests to learn spatio-temporal patterns, that leads to significant improvements over standard Random Forests as well as state-of-the-art approaches on several facial expression benchmarks.
Multi-Conditional Latent Variable Model for Joint Facial Action Unit Detection
Authors: Stefanos Eleftheriadis, Ognjen Rudovic, Maja Pantic
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: We propose a novel multi-conditional latent variable model for simultaneous facial feature fusion and detection of facial action units. In our approach we exploit the structure-discovery capabilities of generative models such as Gaussian processes, and the discriminative power of classifiers such as logistic function. This leads to superior performance compared to existing classifiers for the target task that exploit either the discriminative or generative property, but not both. The model learning is performed via an efficient, newly proposed Bayesian learning strategy based on Monte Carlo sampling. Consequently, the learned model is robust to data overfitting, regardless of the number of both input features and jointly estimated facial action units. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experimental evaluations are performed on three publicly available datasets (CK+, Shoulder-pain and DISFA). We show that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for the target task on (i) feature fusion, and (ii) multiple facial action unit detection.
Leveraging Datasets With Varying Annotations for Face Alignment via Deep Regression Network
Authors: Jie Zhang, Meina Kan, Shiguang Shan, Xilin Chen
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Facial landmark detection, as a vital topic in computer vision, has been studied for many decades and lots of datasets have been collected for evaluation. These datasets usually have different annotations, e.g., 68-landmark markup for LFPW dataset, while 74-landmark markup for GTAV dataset. Intuitively, it is meaningful to fuse all the datasets to predict a union of all types of landmarks from multiple datasets (i.e., transfer the annotations of each dataset to all other datasets), but this problem is nontrivial due to the distribution discrepancy between datasets and incomplete annotations of all types for each dataset. In this work, we propose a deep regression network coupled with sparse shape regression (DRN-SSR) to predict the union of all types of landmarks by leveraging datasets with varying annotations, each dataset with one type of annotation. Specifically, the deep regression network intends to predict the union of all landmarks, and the sparse shape regression attempts to approximate those undefined landmarks on each dataset so as to guide the learning of the deep regression network for face alignment. Extensive experiments on two challenging datasets, IBUG and GLF, demonstrate that our method can effectively leverage the multiple datasets with different annotations to predict the union of all types of landmarks.
A Spatio-Temporal Appearance Representation for Viceo-Based Pedestrian Re-Identification
Authors: Kan Liu, Bingpeng Ma, Wei Zhang, Rui Huang
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Pedestrian re-identification is a difficult problem due to the large variations in a person's appearance caused by different poses and viewpoints, illumination changes, and occlusions. Spatial alignment is commonly used to address these issues by treating the appearance of different body parts independently. However, a body part can also appear differently during different phases of an action. In this paper we consider the temporal alignment problem, in addition to the spatial one, and propose a new approach that takes the video of a walking person as input and builds a spatio-temporal appearance representation for pedestrian re-identification. Particularly, given a video sequence we exploit the periodicity exhibited by a walking person to generate a spatio-temporal body-action model, which consists of a series of body-action units corresponding to certain action primitives of certain body parts. Fisher vectors are learned and extracted from individual body-action units and concatenated into the final representation of the walking person. Unlike previous spatio-temporal features that only take into account local dynamic appearance information, our representation aligns the spatio-temporal appearance of a pedestrian globally. Extensive experiments on public datasets show the effectiveness of our approach compared with the state of the art.
Two Birds, One Stone: Jointly Learning Binary Code for Large-Scale Face Image Retrieval and Attributes Prediction
Authors: Yan Li, Ruiping Wang, Haomiao Liu, Huajie Jiang, Shiguang Shan, Xilin Chen
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: We address the challenging large-scale content-based face image retrieval problem, intended as searching images based on the presence of specific subject, given one face image of him/her. To this end, one natural demand is a supervised binary code learning method. While the learned codes might be discriminating, people often have a further expectation that whether some semantic message (e.g., visual attributes) can be read from the human-incomprehensible codes. For this purpose, we propose a novel binary code learning framework by jointly encoding identity discriminability and a number of facial attributes into unified binary code. In this way, the learned binary codes can be applied to not only fine-grained face image retrieval, but also facial attributes prediction, which is the very innovation of this work, just like killing two birds with one stone. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, extensive experiments are conducted on a new purified large-scale web celebrity database, named CFW 60K, with abundant manual identity and attributes annotation, and experimental results exhibit the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art.
An Accurate Iris Segmentation Framework Under Relaxed Imaging Constraints Using Total Variation Model
Authors: Zijing Zhao, Kumar Ajay
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: This paper proposes a novel and more accurate iris segmentation framework to automatically segment iris region from the face images acquired with relaxed imaging under visible or near-infrared illumination, which provides strong feasibility for applications in surveillance, forensics and the search for missing children, etc. The proposed framework is built on a novel total-variation based formulation which uses l1 norm regularization to robustly suppress noisy texture pixels for the accurate iris localization. A series of novel and robust post processing operations are introduced to more accurately localize the limbic boundaries. Our experimental results on three publicly available databases, i.e., FRGC, UBIRIS.v2 and CASIA.v4-distance, achieve significant performance improvement in terms of iris segmentation accuracy over the state-of-the-art approaches in the literature. Besides, we have shown that using iris masks generated from the proposed approach helps to improve iris recognition performance as well. Unlike prior work, all the implementations in this paper are made publicly available to further advance research and applications in biometrics at-d-distance.
Discriminative Pose-Free Descriptors for Face and Object Matching
Authors: Soubhik Sanyal, Sivaram Prasad Mudunuri, Soma Biswas
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Pose invariant matching is a very important and challenging problem with various applications like recognizing faces in uncontrolled scenarios, matching objects taken from different view points, etc. In this paper, we propose a discriminative pose-free descriptor (DPFD) which can be used to match faces/objects across pose variations. Training examples at very few representative poses are used to generate virtual intermediate pose subspaces. An image or image region is then represented by a feature set obtained by projecting it on all these subspaces and a discriminative transform is applied on this feature set to make it suitable for classification tasks. Finally, this discriminative feature set is represented by a single feature vector, termed as DPFD. The DPFD of images taken from different viewpoints can be directly compared for matching. Extensive experiments on recognizing faces across pose, pose and resolution on the Multi-PIE and Surveillance Cameras Face datasets and comparisons with state-of-the-art approaches show the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Experiments on matching general objects across viewpoints show the generalizability of the proposed approach beyond faces.
Bi-Shifting Auto-Encoder for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation
Authors: Meina Kan, Shiguang Shan, Xilin Chen
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: In many real-world applications, the domain of model learning (referred as source domain) is usually inconsistent with or even different from the domain of testing (referred as target domain), which makes the learnt model degenerate in target domain, i.e., the test domain. To alleviate the discrepancy between source and target domains, we propose a domain adaptation method, named as Bi-shifting Auto-Encoder network (BAE). The proposed BAE attempts to shift source domain samples to target domain, and also shift the target domain samples to source domain. The non-linear transformation of BAE ensures the feasibility of shifting between domains, and the distribution consistency between the shifted domain and the desirable domain is constrained by sparse reconstruction between them. As a result, the shifted source domain is supervised and follows similar distribution as target domain. Therefore, any supervised method can be applied on the shifted source domain to train a classifier for classification in target domain. The proposed method is evaluated on three domain adaptation scenarios of face recognition, i.e., domain adaptation across view angle, ethnicity, and imaging sensor, and the promising results demonstrate that our proposed BAE can shift samples between domains and thus effectively deal with the domain discrepancy.
Regressive Tree Structured Model for Facial Landmark Localization
Authors: Gee-Sern Hsu, Kai-Hsiang Chang, Shih-Chieh Huang
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Although the Tree Structured Model (TSM) is proven effective for solving face detection, pose estimation and landmark localization in an unified model, its sluggish run time makes it unfavorable in practical applications, especially when dealing with cases of multiple faces. We propose the Regressive Tree Structure Model (RTSM) to improve the run-time speed and localization accuracy. The RTSM is composed of two component TSMs, the coarse TSM (c-TSM) and the refined TSM (r-TSM), and a Bilateral Support Vector Regressor (BSVR). The c-TSM is built on the low-resolution octaves of samples so that it provides coarse but fast face detection. The r-TSM is built on the mid-resolution octaves so that it can locate the landmarks on the face candidates given by the c-TSM and improve precision. The r-TSM based landmarks are used in the forward BSVR as references to locate the dense set of landmarks, which are then used in the backward BSVR to relocate the landmarks with large localization errors. The forward and backward regression goes on iteratively until convergence. The performance of the RTSM is validated on three benchmark databases, the Multi-PIE, LFPW and AFW, and compared with the latest TSM to demonstrate its efficacy.
Person Recognition in Personal Photo Collections
Authors: Seong Joon Oh, Rodrigo Benenson, Mario Fritz, Bernt Schiele
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Recognising persons in everyday photos presents major challenges (occluded faces, different clothing, locations, etc.) for machine vision. We propose a convnet based person recognition system on which we provide an in-depth analysis of informativeness of different body cues, impact of training data, and the common failure modes of the system. In addition, we discuss the limitations of existing benchmarks and propose more challenging ones. Our method is simple and is built on open source and open data, yet it improves the state of the art results on a large dataset of social media photos (PIPA).
Robust Statistical Face Frontalization
Authors: Christos Sagonas, Yannis Panagakis, Stefanos Zafeiriou, Maja Pantic
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Recently, it has been shown that excellent results can be achieved in both facial landmark localization and pose-invariant face recognition. These breakthroughs are attributed to the efforts of the community to manually annotate facial images in many different poses and to collect 3D facial data. In this paper, we propose a novel method for joint frontal view reconstruction and landmark localization using a small set of frontal images only. By observing that the frontal facial image is the one having the minimum rank of all different poses, an appropriate model which is able to jointly recover the frontalized version of the face as well as the facial landmarks is devised. To this end, a suitable optimization problem, involving the minimization of the nuclear norm and the matrix l1 norm is solved. The proposed method is assessed in frontal face reconstruction, face landmark localization, pose-invariant face recognition, and face verification in unconstrained conditions. The relevant experiments have been conducted on 8 databases. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in comparison to the state-of-the-art methods for the target problems.
PIEFA: Personalized Incremental and Ensemble Face Alignment
Authors: Xi Peng, Shaoting Zhang, Yu Yang, Dimitris N. Metaxas
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Face alignment, especially on real-time or large-scale sequential images, is a challenging task with broad applications. Both generic and joint alignment approaches have been proposed with varying degrees of success. However, many generic methods are heavily sensitive to initializations and usually rely on offline-trained static models, which limit their performance on sequential images with extensive variations. On the other hand, joint methods are restricted to offline applications, since they require all frames to conduct batch alignment. To address these limitations, we propose to exploit incremental learning for personalized ensemble alignment. We sample multiple initial shapes to achieve image congealing within one frame, which enables us to incrementally conduct ensemble alignment by group-sparse regularized rank minimization. At the same time, personalized modeling is obtained by subspace adaptation under the same incremental framework, while correction strategy is used to alleviate model drifting. Experimental results on multiple controlled and in-the-wild databases demonstrate the superior performance of our approach compared with state-of-the-arts in terms of fitting accuracy and efficiency.
Understanding Everyday Hands in Action From RGB-D Images
Authors: Gregory Rogez, James S. Supancic III, Deva Ramanan
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: We analyze functional manipulations of handheld objects, formalizing the problem as one of fine-grained grasp classification. To do so, we make use of a recently developed fine-grained taxonomy of human-object grasps. We introduce a large dataset of 12000 RGB-D images covering 71 everyday grasps in natural interactions. Our dataset is different from past work (typically addressed from a robotics perspective) in terms of its scale, diversity, and combination of RGB and depth data. From a computer-vision perspective, our dataset allows for exploration of contact and force prediction (crucial concepts in functional grasp analysis) from perceptual cues. We present extensive experimental results with state-of-the-art baselines, illustrating the role of segmentation, object context, and 3D-understanding in functional grasp analysis. We demonstrate a near 2X improvement over prior work and a naive deep baseline, while pointing out important directions for improvement.
Example-Based Modeling of Facial Texture From Deficient Data
Authors: Arnaud Dessein, William A. P. Smith, Richard C. Wilson, Edwin R. Hancock
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: We present an approach to modeling ear-to-ear, high-quality texture from one or more partial views of a face with possibly poor resolution and noise. Our approach is example-based in that we reconstruct texture with patches from a database composed of previously seen faces. A 3D morphable model is used to establish shape correspondence between the observed data across views and training faces. The database is built on the mesh surface by segmenting it into uniform overlapping patches. Texture patches are selected by belief propagation so as to be consistent with neighbors and with observations in an appropriate image formation model. We also develop a variant that is insensitive to light and camera parameters, and incorporate soft symmetry constraints. We obtain textures of higher quality for degraded views as small as 10 pixels wide, than a standard model fitted to non-degraded data. We further show applications to super-resolution where we substantially improve quality compared to a state-of-the-art algorithm, and to texture completion where we fill in missing regions and remove facial clutter in a photorealistic manner.
Learning to Predict Saliency on Face Images
Authors: Mai Xu, Yun Ren, Zulin Wang
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: This paper proposes a novel method, which learns to detect saliency of face images. To be more specific, we obtain a database of eye tracking over extensive face images, via conducting an eye tracking experiment. With analysis on eye tracking database, we verify that the fixations tend to cluster around facial features, when viewing images with large faces. For modeling attention on faces and facial features, the proposed method learns the Gaussian mixture model (GMM) distribution from the fixations of eye tracking data as the top-down features for saliency detection of face images. Then, in our method, the top-down features (i.e., face and facial features) upon the the learnt GMM are linearly combined with the conventional bottom-up features (i.e., color, intensity, and orientation), for saliency detection. In the linear combination, we argue that the weights corresponding to top-down feature channels depend on the face size in images, and the relationship between the weights and face size is thus investigated via learning from the training eye tracking data. Finally, experimental results show that our learning-based method is able to advance state-of-the-art saliency prediction for face images. The corresponding database and code are available online: www.ee.buaa.edu.cn/xumfiles/saliency_detection.html.
Group Membership Prediction
Authors: Ziming Zhang, Yuting Chen, Venkatesh Saligrama
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: The group membership prediction (GMP) problem involves predicting whether or not a collection of instances share a certain semantic property. For instance, in kinship verification given a collection of images, the goal is to predict whether or not they share a familial relationship. In this context we propose a novel probability model and introduce latent view-specific and view-shared random variables to jointly account for the view-specific appearance and cross-view similarities among data instances. Our model posits that data from each view is independent conditioned on the shared variables. This postulate leads to a parametric probability model that decomposes group membership likelihood into a tensor product of data-independent parameters and data-dependent factors. We propose learning the data-independent parameters in a discriminative way with bilinear classifiers, and test our prediction algorithm on challenging visual recognition tasks such as multi-camera person re-identification and kinship verification. On most benchmark datasets, our method can significantly outperform the current state-of-the-art.
Extraction of Virtual Baselines From Distorted Document Images Using Curvilinear Projection
Authors: Gaofeng Meng, Zuming Huang, Yonghong Song, Shiming Xiang, Chunhong Pan
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: The baselines of a document page are a set of virtual horizontal and parallel lines, to which the printed contents of document, e.g., text lines, tables or inserted photos, are aligned. Accurate baseline extraction is of great importance in the geometric correction of curved document images. In this paper, we propose an efficient method for accurate extraction of these virtual visual cues from a curved document image. Our method comes from two basic observations that the baselines of documents do not intersect with each other and that within a narrow strip, the baselines can be well approximated by linear segments. Based upon these observations, we propose a curvilinear projection based method and model the estimation of curved baselines as a constrained sequential optimization problem. A dynamic programming algorithm is then developed to efficiently solve the problem. The proposed method can extract the complete baselines through each pixel of document images in a high accuracy. It is also scripts insensitive and highly robust to image noises, non-textual objects, image resolutions and image quality degradation like blurring and non-uniform illumination. Extensive experiments on a number of captured document images demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Robust RGB-D Odometry Using Point and Line Features
Authors: Yan Lu, Dezhen Song
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Lighting variation and uneven feature distribution are main challenges for indoor RGB-D visual odometry where color information is often combined with depth information. To meet the challenges, we fuse point and line features to form a robust odometry algorithm. Line features are abundant indoors and less sensitive to lighting change than points. We extract 3D points and lines from RGB-D data, analyze their measurement uncertainties, and compute camera motion using maximum likelihood estimation. We prove that fusing points and lines produces smaller motion estimate uncertainty than using either feature type alone. In experiments we compare our method with state-of-the-art methods including a keypoint-based approach and a dense visual odometry  algorithm. Our method outperforms the counterparts under both constant and varying lighting conditions. Specifically, our method achieves an average translational error that is 34.9% smaller than the counterparts, when tested using public datasets.
Learning a Discriminative Model for the Perception of Realism in Composite Images
Authors: Jun-Yan Zhu, Philipp Krahenbuhl, Eli Shechtman, Alexei A. Efros
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: What makes an image appear realistic? In this work, we are answering this question from a data-driven perspective by learning the perception of visual realism directly from large amounts of data. In particular, we train a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model that distinguishes natural photographs from automatically generated composite images. The model learns to predict visual realism of a scene in terms of color, lighting and texture compatibility, without any human annotations pertaining to it. Our model outperforms previous works that rely on hand-crafted heuristics, for the task of classifying realistic vs. unrealistic photos. Furthermore, we apply our learned model to compute optimal parameters of a compositing method, to maximize the visual realism score predicted by our CNN model. We demonstrate its advantage against existing methods via a human perception study.
What Makes Tom Hanks Look Like Tom Hanks
Authors: Supasorn Suwajanakorn, Steven M. Seitz, Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: We reconstruct a controllable model of a person from a large photo collection that captures his or her persona, i.e., physical appearance and behavior.  The ability to operate on unstructured photo collections enables modeling a huge number of people, including celebrities and other well photographed people without requiring them to be scanned.  Moreover, we show the ability to drive or puppeteer the captured person B using any other video of a different person A.  In this scenario, B acts out the role of person A, but retains his/her own personality and character.  Our system is based on a novel combination of 3D face reconstruction, tracking, alignment, and multi-texture modeling, applied to the puppeteering problem.  We demonstrate convincing results on a large variety of celebrities derived from Internet imagery and video.
Wide-Area Image Geolocalization With Aerial Reference Imagery
Authors: Scott Workman, Richard Souvenir, Nathan Jacobs
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: We propose to use deep convolutional neural networks to address the problem of cross-view image geolocalization, in which the geolocation of a ground-level query image is estimated by matching to georeferenced aerial images. We use state-of-the-art feature representations for ground-level images and introduce a cross-view training approach for learning a joint semantic feature representation for aerial images. We also propose a network architecture that fuses features extracted from aerial images at multiple spatial scales.  To support training these networks, we introduce a massive database that contains pairs of aerial and ground-level images from across the United States.  Our methods significantly out-perform the state of the art on two benchmark datasets. We also show, qualitatively, that the proposed feature representations are discriminative at both local and continental spatial scales.
Personalized Age Progression With Aging Dictionary
Authors: Xiangbo Shu, Jinhui Tang, Hanjiang Lai, Luoqi Liu, Shuicheng Yan
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: In this paper, we aim to automatically render aging faces in a personalized way. Basically, a set of age-group specific dictionaries are learned, where the dictionary bases corresponding to the same index yet from different dictionaries form a particular aging process pattern cross different age groups, and a linear combination of these patterns expresses a particular personalized aging process. Moreover, two factors are taken into consideration in the dictionary learning process. First, beyond the aging dictionaries, each subject may have extra personalized facial characteristics, e.g. mole, which are invariant in the aging process. Second, it is challenging or even impossible to collect faces of all age groups for a particular subject, yet much easier and more practical to get face pairs from neighboring age groups. Thus a personality-aware coupled reconstruction loss is utilized to learn the dictionaries based on face pairs from neighboring age groups. Extensive experiments well demonstrate the advantages of our proposed solution over other state-of-the-arts  in term of personalized aging progression, as well as the performance gain for cross-age face verification by synthesizing aging faces.
FaceDirector: Continuous Control of Facial Performance in Video
Authors: Charles Malleson, Jean-Charles Bazin, Oliver Wang, Derek Bradley, Thabo Beeler, Adrian Hilton, Alexander Sorkine-Hornung
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: We present a method to continuously blend between multiple facial performances of an actor, which can contain different facial expressions or emotional states. As an example, given sad and angry video takes of a scene, our method empowers the movie director to specify arbitrary weighted combinations and smooth transitions between the two takes in post-production. Our contributions include (1) a robust nonlinear audio-visual synchronization technique that exploits complementary properties of audio and visual cues to automatically determine robust, dense spatiotemporal correspondences between takes, and (2) a seamless facial blending approach that provides the director full control to interpolate timing, facial expression, and local appearance, in order to generate novel performances after filming. In contrast to most previous works, our approach operates entirely in image space, avoiding the need of 3D facial reconstruction. We demonstrate that our method can synthesize visually believable performances with applications in emotion transition, performance correction, and timing control.
Synthesizing Illumination Mosaics From Internet Photo-Collections
Authors: Dinghuang Ji, Enrique Dunn, Jan-Michael Frahm
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: We propose a framework for the automatic creation of time-lapse mosaics of a given scene. We achieve this by leveraging the illumination variations captured in Internet photo-collections. In order to depict and characterize the illumination spectrum of a scene, our method relies on building discrete representations of the image appearance space through connectivity graphs defined over a pairwise image distance function. The smooth appearance transitions are found as the shortest path in the similarity graph among images, and robust image alignment is achieved by leveraging scene semantics, multi-view geometry, and image warping techniques. The attained results present an insightful and compact visualization of the scene illuminations captured in crowd-sourced imagery.