A literature survey on robust and efficient eye localization in real-life scenarios
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paper_title: In the Eye of the Beholder: A Survey of Models for Eyes and Gaze

paper_content:

Despite active research and significant progress in the last 30 years, eye detection and tracking remains challenging due to the individuality of eyes, occlusion, variability in scale, location, and light conditions. Data on eye location and details of eye movements have numerous applications and are essential in face detection, biometric identification, and particular human-computer interaction tasks. This paper reviews current progress and state of the art in video-based eye detection and tracking in order to identify promising techniques as well as issues to be further addressed. We present a detailed review of recent eye models and techniques for eye detection and tracking. We also survey methods for gaze estimation and compare them based on their geometric properties and reported accuracies. This review shows that, despite their apparent simplicity, the development of a general eye detection technique involves addressing many challenges, requires further theoretical developments, and is consequently of interest to many other domains problems in computer vision and beyond.
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paper_title: Region-based template deformation and masking for eye-feature extraction and description

paper_content:

We propose an improved method for eye-feature extraction, descriptions, and tracking using deformable templates. Some existing algorithms are exploited to locate the initial position of eye features and then deformable templates are used for extracting and describing the eye features. Rather than using original energy minimization for matching the templates, the region-based approach is proposed for template deformation. Based on the region properties, the new strategy avoids problems such as template shrinking, adjusting the weights of energy terms, failure of orientation adjustment due to some exceptional cases. Our strategies are also coupled with Canny edge operator to give a new back-end processing. By integrating the local edge information from the edge detection and the global collector from our region-based template deformation, this processing stage can generate accurate eye-feature descriptions. Finally, the template deformation process is applied to tracking eye features.
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paper_title: Real-time head tracking from the deformation of eye contours using a piecewise affine camera

paper_content:

Abstract A computer vision based approach for human–computer interaction through head movements is presented and evaluated in a non-immersive virtual reality context. Once intercepted and tracked in real-time using a piecewise affine camera model and affine-deformable eye contours, user head displacements are estimated and remapped onto the tridimensional graphic environment according to a natural interface metaphor. Both the real-time performance of the tracker and the improved head parameter estimation accuracy – as compared to the one obtainable using globally affine camera models – encourage the use of this approach to support diverse advanced interaction scenarios and applications.
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paper_title: Robust Face Detection Using the Hausdorff Distance

paper_content:

The localization of human faces in digital images is a fundamental step in the process of face recognition. This paper presents a shape comparison approach to achieve fast, accurate face detection that is robust to changes in illumination and background. The proposed method is edge-based and works on grayscale still images. The Hausdorff distance is used as a similarity measure between a general face model and possible instances of the object within the image. The paper describes an efficient implementation, making this approach suitable for real-time applications. A two-step process that allows both coarse detection and exact localization of faces is presented. Experiments were performed on a large test set base and rated with a new validation measurement.
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paper_title: Locating and extracting the eye in human face images

paper_content:

Facial feature extraction is an important step in automated visual interpretation and human face recognition. Among the facial features, the eye plays the most important part in the recognition process. The deformable template can be used in extracting the eye boundaries. However, the weaknesses of the deformable template are that the processing time is lengthy and that its success relies on the initial position of the template. In this paper, the head boundary is first located in a head-and-shoulders image. The approximate positions of the eyes are estimated by means of average anthropometric measures. Corners, the salient features of the eyes, are detected and used to set the initial parameters of the eye templates. The corner detection scheme introduced in this paper can provide accurate information about the corners. Based on the corner positions, we can accurately locate the templates in relation to the eye images and greatly reduce the processing time for the templates. The performance of the deformable template is assessed with and without using the information on corner positions. Experiments show that a saving in execution time of about 40% on average and a better eye boundary representation can be achieved by using the corner information.
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paper_title: Eye Spacing Measurement for Facial Recognition

paper_content:

Few approaches to automated facial recognition have employed geometric measurement of characteristic features of a human face. Eye spacing measurement has been identified as an important step in achieving this goal. Measurement of spacing has been made by application of the Hough transform technique to detect the instance of a circular shape and of an ellipsoidal shape which approximate the perimeter of the iris and both the perimeter of the sclera and the shape of the region below the eyebrows respectively. Both gradient magnitude and gradient direction were used to handle the noise contaminating the feature space. Results of this application indicate that measurement of the spacing by detection of the iris is the most accurate of these three methods with measurement by detection of the position of the eyebrows the least accurate. However, measurement by detection of the eyebrows' position is the least constrained method. Application of these techniques has led to measurement of a characteristic feature of the human face with sufficient accuracy to merit later inclusion in a full package for automated facial recognition.
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paper_title: Feature extraction from faces using deformable templates

paper_content:

A method for detecting and describing the features of faces using deformable templates is described. The feature of interest, an eye for example, is described by a parameterized template. An energy function is defined which links edges, peaks, and valleys in the image intensity to corresponding properties of the template. The template then interacts dynamically with the image, by altering its parameter values to minimize the energy function, thereby deforming itself to find the best fit. The final parameter values can be used as descriptors for the features. This method is demonstrated by showing deformable templates detecting eyes and mouths in real images. >
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paper_title: On improving eye feature extraction using deformable templates

paper_content:

Abstract An improved method of extracting eye features from facial images using eye templates is described. It retains all advantages of the deformable template method originally proposed by A. L. Yuille, P. W. Hallinan and D. S. Cohen ( Int. J. Comput. Vision 99–111 (1989)) and rectifies some of its weaknesses. This is achieved by the following modifications. First, the original eye template and the overall energy function to represent the most salient features of the eye are modified. Secondly, in order to simplify the issue of selecting weights for the energy terms, the value of each energy term is normalized in the range 0–1 and only two different weights are assigned. This weighting schedule does not require expert knowledge therefore it is more user friendly. Thirdly, all parameters of the template are changed simultaneously during the minimization process rather than using a sequential procedure. This scheme prevents some parameters of the eye template from being overly changed, helps the algorithm to converge to the global minimum, and reduces the processing time. The selection of initial parameters of the eye template is based on an eye window obtained in preprocessing. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate the efficacy of the algorithm. A comparison study of various processing schemes is also given.
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paper_title: Face alignment using local hough voting

paper_content:

We present a novel Hough voting-based method to improve the efficiency and accuracy of fiducial points localization, which can be conveniently integrated with any global prior model for final face alignment. Specifically, two or more stable facial components (e.g., eyes) are first localized and fixed as anchor points, based on which a separate local voting map is constructed for each fiducial point using kernel density estimation. The voting map allows us to effectively constrain the search region of fiducial points by exploiting the local spatial constraints imposed by it. In addition, a multioutput ridge regression method is adopted to align the voting map and the response map of local detectors to the ground truth map, and the learned transformations are then exploited to further increases the robustness of the algorithm against various appearance variations. Encouraging experimental results are given on several publicly available face databases.
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paper_title: Towards a system for automatic facial feature detection

paper_content:

Abstract A model-based methodology is proposed to detect facial features from a front-view ID-type picture. The system is composed of three modules: context (i.e. face location), eye, and mouth. The context module is a low resolution module which defines a face template in terms of intensity valley regions. The valley regions are detected using morphological filtering and 8-connected blob coloring. The objective is to generate a list of hypothesized face locations ranked by face likelihood. The detailed analysis is left for the high resolution eye and mouth modules. The aim for both is to confirm as well as refine the locations and shapes of their respective features of interest. The detection is done via a two-step modelling approach based on the Hough transform and the deformable template technique. The results show that facial features can be located very quickly with Adequate or better fit in over 80% of the images with the proposed system.
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paper_title: Feature extraction from faces using deformable templates

paper_content:

A method for detecting and describing the features of faces using deformable templates is described. The feature of interest, an eye for example, is described by a parameterized template. An energy function is defined which links edges, peaks, and valleys in the image intensity to corresponding properties of the template. The template then interacts dynamically with the image, by altering its parameter values to minimize the energy function, thereby deforming itself to find the best fit. The final parameter values can be used as descriptors for the features. This method is demonstrated by showing deformable templates detecting eyes and mouths in real images.<<ETX>>
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paper_title: Variance projection function and its application to eye detection for human face recognition

paper_content:

Abstract We present a new approach for eye detection using the variance projection function. The variance projection function is developed and employed to locate landmarks of the human eye which are then used to guide the detection of the eye position and shape. A number of eye images are selected to evaluate the capability of the proposed method and the results are encouraging.
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paper_title: Robust Face Detection Using the Hausdorff Distance

paper_content:

The localization of human faces in digital images is a fundamental step in the process of face recognition. This paper presents a shape comparison approach to achieve fast, accurate face detection that is robust to changes in illumination and background. The proposed method is edge-based and works on grayscale still images. The Hausdorff distance is used as a similarity measure between a general face model and possible instances of the object within the image. The paper describes an efficient implementation, making this approach suitable for real-time applications. A two-step process that allows both coarse detection and exact localization of faces is presented. Experiments were performed on a large test set base and rated with a new validation measurement.
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paper_title: Eye Spacing Measurement for Facial Recognition

paper_content:

Few approaches to automated facial recognition have employed geometric measurement of characteristic features of a human face. Eye spacing measurement has been identified as an important step in achieving this goal. Measurement of spacing has been made by application of the Hough transform technique to detect the instance of a circular shape and of an ellipsoidal shape which approximate the perimeter of the iris and both the perimeter of the sclera and the shape of the region below the eyebrows respectively. Both gradient magnitude and gradient direction were used to handle the noise contaminating the feature space. Results of this application indicate that measurement of the spacing by detection of the iris is the most accurate of these three methods with measurement by detection of the position of the eyebrows the least accurate. However, measurement by detection of the eyebrows' position is the least constrained method. Application of these techniques has led to measurement of a characteristic feature of the human face with sufficient accuracy to merit later inclusion in a full package for automated facial recognition.
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paper_title: Feature extraction from faces using deformable templates

paper_content:

A method for detecting and describing the features of faces using deformable templates is described. The feature of interest, an eye for example, is described by a parameterized template. An energy function is defined which links edges, peaks, and valleys in the image intensity to corresponding properties of the template. The template then interacts dynamically with the image, by altering its parameter values to minimize the energy function, thereby deforming itself to find the best fit. The final parameter values can be used as descriptors for the features. This method is demonstrated by showing deformable templates detecting eyes and mouths in real images.<<ETX>>
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paper_title: Object Detection with Discriminatively Trained Part-Based Models

paper_content:

We describe an object detection system based on mixtures of multiscale deformable part models. Our system is able to represent highly variable object classes and achieves state-of-the-art results in the PASCAL object detection challenges. While deformable part models have become quite popular, their value had not been demonstrated on difficult benchmarks such as the PASCAL data sets. Our system relies on new methods for discriminative training with partially labeled data. We combine a margin-sensitive approach for data-mining hard negative examples with a formalism we call latent SVM. A latent SVM is a reformulation of MI--SVM in terms of latent variables. A latent SVM is semiconvex, and the training problem becomes convex once latent information is specified for the positive examples. This leads to an iterative training algorithm that alternates between fixing latent values for positive examples and optimizing the latent SVM objective function.
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paper_title: Variance projection function and its application to eye detection for human face recognition

paper_content:

Abstract We present a new approach for eye detection using the variance projection function. The variance projection function is developed and employed to locate landmarks of the human eye which are then used to guide the detection of the eye position and shape. A number of eye images are selected to evaluate the capability of the proposed method and the results are encouraging.
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paper_title: PRECISE EYE AND MOUTH LOCALIZATION

paper_content:

The literature on the topic has shown a strong correlation between the degree of precision of face localization and the face recognition performance. Hence, there is a need for precise facial feature detectors, as well as objective measures for their evaluation and comparison. In this paper, we will present significant improvements to a previous method for precise eye center localization, by integrating a module for mouth localization. The technique is based on Support Vector Machines trained on optimally chosen Haar wavelet coefficients. The method has been tested on several public databases; the results are reported and compared according to a standard error measure. The tests show that the algorithm achieves high precision of localization.
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paper_title: Facial feature localization using weighted vector concentration approach

paper_content:

We propose an efficient and generic facial feature localization method based on a weighted vector concentration approach. Our method does not require any specific priors on facial shape but implicitly learns its structural information from a training data. Unlike previous work, facial feature points are globally estimated by the concentration of directional vectors from sampling points on a face region, and those vectors are weighted by using local likelihood patterns which discriminate the appropriate position of the feature points. The directional vectors and local likelihood patterns are provided through nearest neighbor search between local patterns around the sampling points and a trained codebook of extended templates. The combination of the global vector concentration and the verification with the local likelihood patterns achieves robust facial feature point detection. We demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art method based on the Active Shape Models in our evaluation.
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paper_title: Pictorial Structures for Object Recognition

paper_content:

In this paper we present a computationally efficient framework for part-based modeling and recognition of objects. Our work is motivated by the pictorial structure models introduced by Fischler and Elschlager. The basic idea is to represent an object by a collection of parts arranged in a deformable configuration. The appearance of each part is modeled separately, and the deformable configuration is represented by spring-like connections between pairs of parts. These models allow for qualitative descriptions of visual appearance, and are suitable for generic recognition problems. We address the problem of using pictorial structure models to find instances of an object in an image as well as the problem of learning an object model from training examples, presenting efficient algorithms in both cases. We demonstrate the techniques by learning models that represent faces and human bodies and using the resulting models to locate the corresponding objects in novel images.
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paper_title: On detection of multiple object instances using hough transforms

paper_content:

To detect multiple objects of interest, the methods based on Hough transform use non-maxima supression or mode seeking in order to locate and to distinguish peaks in Hough images. Such postprocessing requires tuning of extra parameters and is often fragile, especially when objects of interest tend to be closely located. In the paper, we develop a new probabilistic framework that is in many ways related to Hough transform, sharing its simplicity and wide applicability. At the same time, the framework bypasses the problem of multiple peaks identification in Hough images, and permits detection of multiple objects without invoking nonmaximum suppression heuristics. As a result, the experiments demonstrate a significant improvement in detection accuracy both for the classical task of straight line detection and for a more modern category-level (pedestrian) detection problem.
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paper_title: Using geometric properties of topographic manifold to detect and track eyes for human-computer interaction

paper_content:

Automatic eye detection and tracking is an important component for advanced human-computer interface design. Accurate eye localization can help develop a successful system for face recognition and emotion identification. In this article, we propose a novel approach to detect and track eyes using geometric surface features on topographic manifold of eye images. First, in the joint spatial-intensity domain, a facial image is treated as a 3D terrain surface or image topographic manifold. In particular, eye regions exhibit certain intrinsic geometric traits on this topographic manifold, namely, the pit-labeled center and hillside-like surround regions. Applying a terrain classification procedure on the topographic manifold of facial images, each location of the manifold can be labeled to generate a terrain map. We use the distribution of terrain labels to represent the eye terrain pattern. The Bhattacharyya affinity is employed to measure the distribution similarity between two topographic manifolds. Based on the Bhattacharyya kernel, a support vector machine is applied for selecting proper eye pairs from the pit-labeled candidates. Second, given detected eyes on the first frame of a video sequence, a mutual-information-based fitting function is defined to describe the similarity between two terrain surfaces of neighboring frames. By optimizing the fitting function, eye locations are updated for subsequent frames. The distinction of the proposed approach lies in that both eye detection and eye tracking are performed on the derived topographic manifold, rather than on an original-intensity image domain. The robustness of the approach is demonstrated under various imaging conditions and with different facial appearances, using both static images and video sequences without background constraints.
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paper_title: Detection of eye locations in unconstrained visual images

paper_content:

This paper describes a computational approach for accurately determining the location of human eyes in unconstrained monoscopic gray level images. The proposed method is based on exploiting the flow field characteristics that arise due to the presence of a dark iris surrounded by a light sclera. A novel aspect of the proposed method lies in its use of both spatial and temporal information to detect the location of the eyes. The spatial processing utilizes flow field information to select a pool of potential candidate locations for the eyes. Temporal processing uses the principle of continuity to filter out the actual location of the eyes from the pool of potential candidates. Extensions for gaze angle determination, and the tracking of human point-of-regard are indicated.
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paper_title: Robust Object Detection with Interleaved Categorization and Segmentation

paper_content:

This paper presents a novel method for detecting and localizing objects of a visual category in cluttered real-world scenes. Our approach considers object categorization and figure-ground segmentation as two interleaved processes that closely collaborate towards a common goal. As shown in our work, the tight coupling between those two processes allows them to benefit from each other and improve the combined performance. ::: ::: The core part of our approach is a highly flexible learned representation for object shape that can combine the information observed on different training examples in a probabilistic extension of the Generalized Hough Transform. The resulting approach can detect categorical objects in novel images and automatically infer a probabilistic segmentation from the recognition result. This segmentation is then in turn used to again improve recognition by allowing the system to focus its efforts on object pixels and to discard misleading influences from the background. Moreover, the information from where in the image a hypothesis draws its support is employed in an MDL based hypothesis verification stage to resolve ambiguities between overlapping hypotheses and factor out the effects of partial occlusion. ::: ::: An extensive evaluation on several large data sets shows that the proposed system is applicable to a range of different object categories, including both rigid and articulated objects. In addition, its flexible representation allows it to achieve competitive object detection performance already from training sets that are between one and two orders of magnitude smaller than those used in comparable systems.
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paper_title: An Implicit Shape Model for Combined Object Categorization and Segmentation

paper_content:

We present a method for object categorization in real-world scenes. Following a common consensus in the field, we do not assume that a figure-ground segmentation is available prior to recognition. However, in contrast to most standard approaches for object class recognition, our approach automatically segments the object as a result of the categorization.
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paper_title: Fast PRISM: Branch and Bound Hough Transform for Object Class Detection

paper_content:

This paper addresses the task of efficient object class detection by means of the Hough transform. This approach has been made popular by the Implicit Shape Model (ISM) and has been adopted many times. Although ISM exhibits robust detection performance, its probabilistic formulation is unsatisfactory. The PRincipled Implicit Shape Model (PRISM) overcomes these problems by interpreting Hough voting as a dual implementation of linear sliding-window detection. It thereby gives a sound justification to the voting procedure and imposes minimal constraints. We demonstrate PRISM's flexibility by two complementary implementations: a generatively trained Gaussian Mixture Model as well as a discriminatively trained histogram approach. Both systems achieve state-of-the-art performance. Detections are found by gradient-based or branch and bound search, respectively. The latter greatly benefits from PRISM's feature-centric view. It thereby avoids the unfavourable memory trade-off and any on-line pre-processing of the original Efficient Subwindow Search (ESS). Moreover, our approach takes account of the features' scale value while ESS does not. Finally, we show how to avoid soft-matching and spatial pyramid descriptors during detection without losing their positive effect. This makes algorithms simpler and faster. Both are possible if the object model is properly regularised and we discuss a modification of SVMs which allows for doing so.
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paper_title: The Representation and Matching of Pictorial Structures

paper_content:

The primary problem dealt with in this paper is the following. Given some description of a visual object, find that object in an actual photograph. Part of the solution to this problem is the specification of a descriptive scheme, and a metric on which to base the decision of "goodness" of matching or detection.
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paper_title: Real-time detection of nodding and head-shaking by directly detecting and tracking the "between-eyes"

paper_content:

Among head gestures, nodding and head-shaking are very common and used often. Thus the detection of such gestures is basic to a visual understanding of human responses. However it is difficult to detect them in real-time, because nodding and head-shaking are fairly small and fast head movements. We propose an approach for detecting nodding and head-shaking in real time from a single color video stream by directly detecting and tracking a point between the eyes, or what we call the "between-eyes". Along a circle of a certain radius centered at the "between-eyes", the pixel value has two cycles of bright parts (forehead and nose bridge) and dark parts (eyes and brows). The output of the proposed circle-frequency filter has a local maximum at these characteristic points. To distinguish the true "between-eyes" from similar characteristic points in other face parts, we do a confirmation with eye detection. Once the "between-eyes" is detected, a small area around it is copied as a template and the system enters the tracking mode. Combining with the circle-frequency filtering and the template, the tracking is done not by searching around but by selecting candidates using the template; the template is then updated. Due to this special tracking algorithm, the system can track the "between-eyes" stably and accurately. It runs at 13 frames/s rate without special hardware. By analyzing the movement of the point, we can detect nodding and head-shaking. Some experimental results are shown.
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paper_title: Illumination Invariant Face Recognition Using Near-Infrared Images

paper_content:

Most current face recognition systems are designed for indoor, cooperative-user applications. However, even in thus-constrained applications, most existing systems, academic and commercial, are compromised in accuracy by changes in environmental illumination. In this paper, we present a novel solution for illumination invariant face recognition for indoor, cooperative-user applications. First, we present an active near infrared (NIR) imaging system that is able to produce face images of good condition regardless of visible lights in the environment. Second, we show that the resulting face images encode intrinsic information of the face, subject only to a monotonic transform in the gray tone; based on this, we use local binary pattern (LBP) features to compensate for the monotonic transform, thus deriving an illumination invariant face representation. Then, we present methods for face recognition using NIR images; statistical learning algorithms are used to extract most discriminative features from a large pool of invariant LBP features and construct a highly accurate face matching engine. Finally, we present a system that is able to achieve accurate and fast face recognition in practice, in which a method is provided to deal with specular reflections of active NIR lights on eyeglasses, a critical issue in active NIR image-based face recognition. Extensive, comparative results are provided to evaluate the imaging hardware, the face and eye detection algorithms, and the face recognition algorithms and systems, with respect to various factors, including illumination, eyeglasses, time lapse, and ethnic groups
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paper_title: Real-time eye detection and tracking under various light conditions

paper_content:

Non-intrusive methods based on active remote IR illumination for eye tracking are important for many applications of vision-based man-machine interaction. One problem that has plagued those methods is their sensitivity to lighting condition change. This tends to significantly limit their scope of application. In this paper, we present a new real-time eye detection and tracking methodology that works under variable and realistic lighting conditions. Based on combining the bright-pupil effect resulted from IR light and the conventional appearance-based object recognition technique, our method can robustly track eyes when the pupils are not very bright due to significant external illumination interferences. The appearance model is incorporated in both eyes detection and tracking via the use of support vector machine and the mean shift tracking. Additional improvement is achieved from modifying the image acquisition apparatus including the illuminator and the camera.
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paper_title: Robust Real-Time Eye Detection and Tracking Under Variable Lighting Conditions and Various Face Orientations

paper_content:

Most eye trackers based on active IR illumination require distinctive bright pupil effect to work well. However, due to a variety of factors such as eye closure, eye occlusion, and external illumination interference, pupils are not bright enough for these methods to work well. This tends to significantly limit their scope of application. In this paper, we present an integrated eye tracker to overcome these limitations. By combining the latest technologies in appearance-based object recognition and tracking with active IR illumination, our eye tracker can robustly track eyes under variable and realistic lighting conditions and under various face orientations. In addition, our integrated eye tracker is able to handle occlusion, glasses, and to simultaneously track multiple people with different distances and poses to the camera. Results from an extensive experiment shows a significant improvement of our technique over existing eye tracking techniques.
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paper_title: In the Eye of the Beholder: A Survey of Models for Eyes and Gaze

paper_content:

Despite active research and significant progress in the last 30 years, eye detection and tracking remains challenging due to the individuality of eyes, occlusion, variability in scale, location, and light conditions. Data on eye location and details of eye movements have numerous applications and are essential in face detection, biometric identification, and particular human-computer interaction tasks. This paper reviews current progress and state of the art in video-based eye detection and tracking in order to identify promising techniques as well as issues to be further addressed. We present a detailed review of recent eye models and techniques for eye detection and tracking. We also survey methods for gaze estimation and compare them based on their geometric properties and reported accuracies. This review shows that, despite their apparent simplicity, the development of a general eye detection technique involves addressing many challenges, requires further theoretical developments, and is consequently of interest to many other domains problems in computer vision and beyond.
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paper_title: Locating and extracting the eye in human face images

paper_content:

Facial feature extraction is an important step in automated visual interpretation and human face recognition. Among the facial features, the eye plays the most important part in the recognition process. The deformable template can be used in extracting the eye boundaries. However, the weaknesses of the deformable template are that the processing time is lengthy and that its success relies on the initial position of the template. In this paper, the head boundary is first located in a head-and-shoulders image. The approximate positions of the eyes are estimated by means of average anthropometric measures. Corners, the salient features of the eyes, are detected and used to set the initial parameters of the eye templates. The corner detection scheme introduced in this paper can provide accurate information about the corners. Based on the corner positions, we can accurately locate the templates in relation to the eye images and greatly reduce the processing time for the templates. The performance of the deformable template is assessed with and without using the information on corner positions. Experiments show that a saving in execution time of about 40% on average and a better eye boundary representation can be achieved by using the corner information.
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paper_title: Automatic Eye Detection and Its Validation

paper_content:

The accuracy of face alignment affects the performance of a face recognition system. Since face alignment is usually conducted using eye positions, an accurate eye localization algorithm is therefore essential for accurate face recognition. In this paper, we first study the impact of eye locations on face recognition accuracy, and then introduce an automatic technique for eye detection. The performance of our automatic eye detection technique is subsequently validated using FRGC 1.0 database. The validation shows that our eye detector has an overall 94.5% eye detection rate, with the detected eyes very close to the manually provided eye positions. In addition, the face recognition performance based on the automatic eye detection is shown to be comparable to that of using manually given eye positions.
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paper_title: Eye localization in low and standard definition content with application to face matching

paper_content:

In this paper we address the problem of eye localization for the purpose of face matching in low and standard definition image and video content. In addition to an explorative study that aimed at discovering the effect of eye localization accuracy on face matching performance, we also present a probabilistic eye localization method based on well-known multi-scale local binary patterns (LBPs). These patterns provide a simple but powerful spatial description of texture, and are robust to the noise typical to low and standard definition content. The extensive evaluation involving multiple eye localizers and face matchers showed that the shape of the eye localizer error distribution has a big impact on face matching performance. Conditioned by the error distribution shape and the minimum required eye localization accuracy, eye localization can boost the performance of naive face matchers and allow for more efficient face matching without degrading its performance. The evaluation also showed that our proposed method has superior accuracy with respect to the state-of-the-art on eye localization, and that it fulfills the criteria for improving the face matching performance and efficiency mentioned above.
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paper_title: A performance evaluation of local descriptors

paper_content:

In this paper, we compare the performance of descriptors computed for local interest regions, as, for example, extracted by the Harris-Affine detector [Mikolajczyk, K and Schmid, C, 2004]. Many different descriptors have been proposed in the literature. It is unclear which descriptors are more appropriate and how their performance depends on the interest region detector. The descriptors should be distinctive and at the same time robust to changes in viewing conditions as well as to errors of the detector. Our evaluation uses as criterion recall with respect to precision and is carried out for different image transformations. We compare shape context [Belongie, S, et al., April 2002], steerable filters [Freeman, W and Adelson, E, Setp. 1991], PCA-SIFT [Ke, Y and Sukthankar, R, 2004], differential invariants [Koenderink, J and van Doorn, A, 1987], spin images [Lazebnik, S, et al., 2003], SIFT [Lowe, D. G., 1999], complex filters [Schaffalitzky, F and Zisserman, A, 2002], moment invariants [Van Gool, L, et al., 1996], and cross-correlation for different types of interest regions. We also propose an extension of the SIFT descriptor and show that it outperforms the original method. Furthermore, we observe that the ranking of the descriptors is mostly independent of the interest region detector and that the SIFT-based descriptors perform best. Moments and steerable filters show the best performance among the low dimensional descriptors.
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paper_title: Distinctive Image Features from Scale-Invariant Keypoints

paper_content:

The Scale-Invariant Feature Transform (or SIFT) algorithm is a highly robust method to extract and consequently match distinctive invariant features from images. These features can then be used to reliably match objects in diering images. The algorithm was rst proposed by Lowe [12] and further developed to increase performance resulting in the classic paper [13] that served as foundation for SIFT which has played an important role in robotic and machine vision in the past decade.
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paper_title: Facial feature detection with optimal pixel reduction SVM

paper_content:

Automatic facial feature localization has been a long-standing challenge in the field of computer vision for several decades. This can be explained by the large variation a face in an image can have due to factors such as position, facial expression, pose, illumination, and background clutter. Support Vector Machines (SVMs) have been a popular statistical tool for facial feature detection. Traditional SVM approaches to facial feature detection typically extract features from images (e.g. multiband filter, SIFT features) and learn the SVM parameters. Independently learning features and SVM parameters might result in a loss of information related to the classification process. This paper proposes an energy-based framework to jointly perform relevant feature weighting and SVM parameter learning. Preliminary experiments on standard face databases have shown significant improvement in speed with our approach.
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paper_title: Precise eye localization through a general-to-specific model definition

paper_content:

We present a method for precise eye localization that uses two Support Vector Machines trained on properly selected Haar wavelet coefficients. The evaluation of our technique on many standard databases exhibits very good performance. Furthermore, we study the strong correlation between the eye localization error and the face recognition rate.
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paper_title: A novel pupil localization method based on GaborEye model and radial symmetry operator

paper_content:

The eyes are the most important facial landmarks on the human face. The accuracy of face normalization, which is critical to the performance of the following face analysis steps, depends on the locations of the two eyes, as well as their relatively constant interocular distance. In this paper, we propose a novel GaborEye model for eye localization. Based on the special gray distribution in the eye-and-brow region, a proper Gabor kernel is adaptively chosen to convolute with the face image to highlight the eye-and-brow region, which can be exploited to segment the two pupil regions efficiently. After getting the region of the pupil, a fast radial symmetry operator is used to locate the center of the pupil. Extensive experiments show that the method can accurately locate the pupils, and it is robust to the variations of face poses, expressions, accessories and illuminations.
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paper_title: Face recognition with learning-based descriptor

paper_content:

We present a novel approach to address the representation issue and the matching issue in face recognition (verification). Firstly, our approach encodes the micro-structures of the face by a new learning-based encoding method. Unlike many previous manually designed encoding methods (e.g., LBP or SIFT), we use unsupervised learning techniques to learn an encoder from the training examples, which can automatically achieve very good tradeoff between discriminative power and invariance. Then we apply PCA to get a compact face descriptor. We find that a simple normalization mechanism after PCA can further improve the discriminative ability of the descriptor. The resulting face representation, learning-based (LE) descriptor, is compact, highly discriminative, and easy-to-extract. To handle the large pose variation in real-life scenarios, we propose a pose-adaptive matching method that uses pose-specific classifiers to deal with different pose combinations (e.g., frontal v.s. frontal, frontal v.s. left) of the matching face pair. Our approach is comparable with the state-of-the-art methods on the Labeled Face in Wild (LFW) benchmark (we achieved 84.45% recognition rate), while maintaining excellent compactness, simplicity, and generalization ability across different datasets.
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paper_title: Enhanced Local Texture Feature Sets for Face Recognition Under Difficult Lighting Conditions

paper_content:

Making recognition more reliable under uncontrolled lighting conditions is one of the most important challenges for practical face recognition systems. We tackle this by combining the strengths of robust illumination normalization, local texture-based face representations, distance transform based matching, kernel-based feature extraction and multiple feature fusion. Specifically, we make three main contributions: 1) we present a simple and efficient preprocessing chain that eliminates most of the effects of changing illumination while still preserving the essential appearance details that are needed for recognition; 2) we introduce local ternary patterns (LTP), a generalization of the local binary pattern (LBP) local texture descriptor that is more discriminant and less sensitive to noise in uniform regions, and we show that replacing comparisons based on local spatial histograms with a distance transform based similarity metric further improves the performance of LBP/LTP based face recognition; and 3) we further improve robustness by adding Kernel principal component analysis (PCA) feature extraction and incorporating rich local appearance cues from two complementary sources-Gabor wavelets and LBP-showing that the combination is considerably more accurate than either feature set alone. The resulting method provides state-of-the-art performance on three data sets that are widely used for testing recognition under difficult illumination conditions: Extended Yale-B, CAS-PEAL-R1, and Face Recognition Grand Challenge version 2 experiment 4 (FRGC-204). For example, on the challenging FRGC-204 data set it halves the error rate relative to previously published methods, achieving a face verification rate of 88.1% at 0.1% false accept rate. Further experiments show that our preprocessing method outperforms several existing preprocessors for a range of feature sets, data sets and lighting conditions.
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paper_title: Locally Assembled Binary (LAB) feature with feature-centric cascade for fast and accurate face detection

paper_content:

In this paper, we describe a novel type of feature for fast and accurate face detection. The feature is called Locally Assembled Binary (LAB) Haar feature. LAB feature is basically inspired by the success of Haar feature and Local Binary Pattern (LBP) for face detection, but it is far beyond a simple combination. In our method, Haar features are modified to keep only the ordinal relationship (named by binary Haar feature) rather than the difference between the accumulated intensities. Several neighboring binary Haar features are then assembled to capture their co-occurrence with similar idea to LBP. We show that the feature is more efficient than Haar feature and LBP both in discriminating power and computational cost. Furthermore, a novel efficient detection method called feature-centric cascade is proposed to build an efficient detector, which is developed from the feature-centric method. Experimental results on the CMU+MIT frontal face test set and CMU profile test set show that the proposed method can achieve very good results and amazing detection speed.
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paper_title: Eye localization through multiscale sparse dictionaries

paper_content:

This paper presents a new eye localization method via Multiscale Sparse Dictionaries (MSD). We built a pyramid of dictionaries that models context information at multiple scales. Eye locations are estimated at each scale by fitting the image through sparse coefficients of the dictionary. By using context information, our method is robust to various eye appearances. The method also works efficiently since it avoids sliding a search window in the image during localization. The experiments in BioID database prove the effectiveness of our method.
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paper_title: Face Description with Local Binary Patterns: Application to Face Recognition

paper_content:

This paper presents a novel and efficient facial image representation based on local binary pattern (LBP) texture features. The face image is divided into several regions from which the LBP feature distributions are extracted and concatenated into an enhanced feature vector to be used as a face descriptor. The performance of the proposed method is assessed in the face recognition problem under different challenges. Other applications and several extensions are also discussed
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paper_title: Regression and classification approaches to eye localization in face images

paper_content:

We address the task of accurately localizing the eyes in face images extracted by a face detector, an important problem to be solved because of the negative effect of poor localization on face recognition accuracy. We investigate three approaches to the task: a regression approach aiming to directly minimize errors in the predicted eye positions, a simple Bayesian model of eye and non-eye appearance, and a discriminative eye detector trained using AdaBoost. By using identical training and test data for each method we are able to perform an unbiased comparison. We show that, perhaps surprisingly, the simple Bayesian approach performs best on databases including challenging images, and performance is comparable to more complex state-of-the-art methods.
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paper_title: Training-Free, Generic Object Detection Using Locally Adaptive Regression Kernels

paper_content:

We present a generic detection/localization algorithm capable of searching for a visual object of interest without training. The proposed method operates using a single example of an object of interest to find similar matches, does not require prior knowledge (learning) about objects being sought, and does not require any preprocessing step or segmentation of a target image. Our method is based on the computation of local regression kernels as descriptors from a query, which measure the likeness of a pixel to its surroundings. Salient features are extracted from said descriptors and compared against analogous features from the target image. This comparison is done using a matrix generalization of the cosine similarity measure. We illustrate optimality properties of the algorithm using a naive-Bayes framework. The algorithm yields a scalar resemblance map, indicating the likelihood of similarity between the query and all patches in the target image. By employing nonparametric significance tests and nonmaxima suppression, we detect the presence and location of objects similar to the given query. The approach is extended to account for large variations in scale and rotation. High performance is demonstrated on several challenging data sets, indicating successful detection of objects in diverse contexts and under different imaging conditions.
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paper_title: The FERET evaluation methodology for face-recognition algorithms

paper_content:

Two of the most critical requirements in support of producing reliable face-recognition systems are a large database of facial images and a testing procedure to evaluate systems. The Face Recognition Technology (FERET) program has addressed both issues through the FERET database of facial images and the establishment of the FERET tests. To date, 14,126 images from 1199 individuals are included in the FERET database, which is divided into development and sequestered portions. In September 1996, the FERET program administered the third in a series of FERET face-recognition tests. The primary objectives of the third test were to (1) assess the state of the art, (2) identify future areas of research, and (3) measure algorithm performance on large databases.
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paper_title: Average of Synthetic Exact Filters

paper_content:

This paper introduces a class of correlation filters called average of synthetic exact filters (ASEF). For ASEF, the correlation output is completely specified for each training image. This is in marked contrast to prior methods such as synthetic discriminant functions (SDFs) which only specify a single output value per training image. Advantages of ASEF training include: insensitivity to over-fitting, greater flexibility with regard to training images, and more robust behavior in the presence of structured backgrounds. The theory and design of ASEF filters is presented using eye localization on the FERET database as an example task. ASEF is compared to other popular correlation filters including SDF, MACE, OTF, and UMACE, and with other eye localization methods including Gabor Jets and the OpenCV cascade classifier. ASEF is shown to outperform all these methods, locating the eye to within the radius of the iris approximately 98.5% of the time.
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paper_title: Automatic Eye Detection and Its Validation

paper_content:

The accuracy of face alignment affects the performance of a face recognition system. Since face alignment is usually conducted using eye positions, an accurate eye localization algorithm is therefore essential for accurate face recognition. In this paper, we first study the impact of eye locations on face recognition accuracy, and then introduce an automatic technique for eye detection. The performance of our automatic eye detection technique is subsequently validated using FRGC 1.0 database. The validation shows that our eye detector has an overall 94.5% eye detection rate, with the detected eyes very close to the manually provided eye positions. In addition, the face recognition performance based on the automatic eye detection is shown to be comparable to that of using manually given eye positions.
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paper_title: Learning to localize objects with structured output regression

paper_content:

Sliding window classifiers are among the most successful and widely applied techniques for object localization. However, training is typically done in a way that is not specific to the localization task. First a binary classifier is trained using a sample of positive and negative examples, and this classifier is subsequently applied to multiple regions within test images. We propose instead to treat object localization in a principled way by posing it as a problem of predicting structured data: we model the problem not as binary classification, but as the prediction of the bounding box of objects located in images. The use of a joint-kernelframework allows us to formulate the training procedure as a generalization of an SVM, which can be solved efficiently. We further improve computational efficiency by using a branch-and-bound strategy for localization during both training and testing. Experimental evaluation on the PASCAL VOC and TU Darmstadt datasets show that the structured training procedure improves performance over binary training as well as the best previously published scores.
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paper_title: Neural network-based face detection

paper_content:

We present a neural network-based upright frontal face detection system. A retinally connected neural network examines small windows of an image and decides whether each window contains a face. The system arbitrates between multiple networks to improve performance over a single network. We present a straightforward procedure for aligning positive face examples for training. To collect negative examples, we use a bootstrap algorithm, which adds false detections into the training set as training progresses. This eliminates the difficult task of manually selecting nonface training examples, which must be chosen to span the entire space of nonface images. Simple heuristics, such as using the fact that faces rarely overlap in images, can further improve the accuracy. Comparisons with several other state-of-the-art face detection systems are presented, showing that our system has comparable performance in terms of detection and false-positive rates.
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paper_title: View-based and modular eigenspaces for face recognition

paper_content:

We describe experiments with eigenfaces for recognition and interactive search in a large-scale face database. Accurate visual recognition is demonstrated using a database of O(10/sup 3/) faces. The problem of recognition under general viewing orientation is also examined. A view-based multiple-observer eigenspace technique is proposed for use in face recognition under variable pose. In addition, a modular eigenspace description technique is used which incorporates salient features such as the eyes, nose and mouth, in an eigenfeature layer. This modular representation yields higher recognition rates as well as a more robust framework for face recognition. An automatic feature extraction technique using feature eigentemplates is also demonstrated. >
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paper_title: Max-margin additive classifiers for detection

paper_content:

We present methods for training high quality object detectors very quickly. The core contribution is a pair of fast training algorithms for piece-wise linear classifiers, which can approximate arbitrary additive models. The classifiers are trained in a max-margin framework and significantly outperform linear classifiers on a variety of vision datasets. We report experimental results quantifying training time and accuracy on image classification tasks and pedestrian detection, including detection results better than the best previous on the INRIA dataset with faster training.
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paper_title: Robust precise eye location by adaboost and SVM techniques

paper_content:

This paper presents a novel approach for eye detection using a hierarchy cascade classifier based on Adaboost statistical learning method combined with SVM (Support Vector Machines) post classifier. On the first stage a face detector is used to locate the face in the whole image. After finding the face, an eye detector is used to detect the possible eye candidates within the face areas. Finally, the precise eye positions are decided by the eye-pair SVM classifiers which using geometrical and relative position information of eye-pair and the face. Experimental results show that this method can effectively cope with various image conditions and achieve better location performance on diverse test sets than some newly proposed methods.
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paper_title: Facial feature detection with optimal pixel reduction SVM

paper_content:

Automatic facial feature localization has been a long-standing challenge in the field of computer vision for several decades. This can be explained by the large variation a face in an image can have due to factors such as position, facial expression, pose, illumination, and background clutter. Support Vector Machines (SVMs) have been a popular statistical tool for facial feature detection. Traditional SVM approaches to facial feature detection typically extract features from images (e.g. multiband filter, SIFT features) and learn the SVM parameters. Independently learning features and SVM parameters might result in a loss of information related to the classification process. This paper proposes an energy-based framework to jointly perform relevant feature weighting and SVM parameter learning. Preliminary experiments on standard face databases have shown significant improvement in speed with our approach.
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paper_title: For your eyes only

paper_content:

In this paper, we take a look at an enhanced approach for eye detection under difficult acquisition circumstances such as low-light, distance, pose variation, and blur. We present a novel correlation filter based eye detection pipeline that is specifically designed to reduce face alignment errors, thereby increasing eye localization accuracy and ultimately face recognition accuracy. The accuracy of our eye detector is validated using data derived from the Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) and the Face Detection on Hard Datasets Competition 2011 (FDHD) sets. The results on the LFW dataset also show that the proposed algorithm exhibits enhanced performance, compared to another correlation filter based detector, and that a considerable increase in face recognition accuracy may be achieved by focusing more effort on the eye localization stage of the face recognition process. Our results on the FDHD dataset show that our eye detector exhibits superior performance, compared to 11 different state-of-the-art algorithms, on the entire set of difficult data without any per set modifications to our detection or preprocessing algorithms. The immediate application of eye detection is automatic face recognition, though many good applications exist in other areas, including medical research, training simulators, communication systems for the disabled, and automotive engineering.
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paper_title: Precise eye localization through a general-to-specific model definition

paper_content:

We present a method for precise eye localization that uses two Support Vector Machines trained on properly selected Haar wavelet coefficients. The evaluation of our technique on many standard databases exhibits very good performance. Furthermore, we study the strong correlation between the eye localization error and the face recognition rate.
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paper_title: Robust precise eye location under probabilistic framework

paper_content:

Eye feature location is an important step in automatic visual interpretation and human face recognition. In this paper, a novel approach for locating eye centers in face areas under probabilistic framework is devised. After grossly locating a face, we first find the areas which left and right eyes lies in. Then an appearance-based eye detector is used to detect the possible left and right eye separately. According to their probabilities, the candidates are subsampled to merge those in near positions. Finally, the remaining left and right eye candidates are paired; each possible eye pair is normalized and verified. According to their probabilities, the precise eye positions are decided. The experimental results demonstrate that our method can effectively cope with different eye variations and achieve better location performance on diverse test sets than some newly proposed methods. And the influence of precision of eye location on face recognition is also probed. The location of other face organs such as mouth and nose can be incorporated in the framework easily.
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paper_title: Beyond sliding windows: Object localization by efficient subwindow search

paper_content:

Most successful object recognition systems rely on binary classification, deciding only if an object is present or not, but not providing information on the actual object location. To perform localization, one can take a sliding window approach, but this strongly increases the computational cost, because the classifier function has to be evaluated over a large set of candidate subwindows. In this paper, we propose a simple yet powerful branch-and-bound scheme that allows efficient maximization of a large class of classifier functions over all possible subimages. It converges to a globally optimal solution typically in sublinear time. We show how our method is applicable to different object detection and retrieval scenarios. The achieved speedup allows the use of classifiers for localization that formerly were considered too slow for this task, such as SVMs with a spatial pyramid kernel or nearest neighbor classifiers based on the chi2-distance. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance of the resulting systems on the UIUC Cars dataset, the PASCAL VOC 2006 dataset and in the PASCAL VOC 2007 competition.
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paper_title: Classification using intersection kernel support vector machines is efficient

paper_content:

Straightforward classification using kernelized SVMs requires evaluating the kernel for a test vector and each of the support vectors. For a class of kernels we show that one can do this much more efficiently. In particular we show that one can build histogram intersection kernel SVMs (IKSVMs) with runtime complexity of the classifier logarithmic in the number of support vectors as opposed to linear for the standard approach. We further show that by precomputing auxiliary tables we can construct an approximate classifier with constant runtime and space requirements, independent of the number of support vectors, with negligible loss in classification accuracy on various tasks. This approximation also applies to 1 - chi2 and other kernels of similar form. We also introduce novel features based on a multi-level histograms of oriented edge energy and present experiments on various detection datasets. On the INRIA pedestrian dataset an approximate IKSVM classifier based on these features has the current best performance, with a miss rate 13% lower at 10-6 False Positive Per Window than the linear SVM detector of Dalal & Triggs. On the Daimler Chrysler pedestrian dataset IKSVM gives comparable accuracy to the best results (based on quadratic SVM), while being 15times faster. In these experiments our approximate IKSVM is up to 2000times faster than a standard implementation and requires 200times less memory. Finally we show that a 50times speedup is possible using approximate IKSVM based on spatial pyramid features on the Caltech 101 dataset with negligible loss of accuracy.
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paper_title: Locally Assembled Binary (LAB) feature with feature-centric cascade for fast and accurate face detection

paper_content:

In this paper, we describe a novel type of feature for fast and accurate face detection. The feature is called Locally Assembled Binary (LAB) Haar feature. LAB feature is basically inspired by the success of Haar feature and Local Binary Pattern (LBP) for face detection, but it is far beyond a simple combination. In our method, Haar features are modified to keep only the ordinal relationship (named by binary Haar feature) rather than the difference between the accumulated intensities. Several neighboring binary Haar features are then assembled to capture their co-occurrence with similar idea to LBP. We show that the feature is more efficient than Haar feature and LBP both in discriminating power and computational cost. Furthermore, a novel efficient detection method called feature-centric cascade is proposed to build an efficient detector, which is developed from the feature-centric method. Experimental results on the CMU+MIT frontal face test set and CMU profile test set show that the proposed method can achieve very good results and amazing detection speed.
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paper_title: Fast PRISM: Branch and Bound Hough Transform for Object Class Detection

paper_content:

This paper addresses the task of efficient object class detection by means of the Hough transform. This approach has been made popular by the Implicit Shape Model (ISM) and has been adopted many times. Although ISM exhibits robust detection performance, its probabilistic formulation is unsatisfactory. The PRincipled Implicit Shape Model (PRISM) overcomes these problems by interpreting Hough voting as a dual implementation of linear sliding-window detection. It thereby gives a sound justification to the voting procedure and imposes minimal constraints. We demonstrate PRISM's flexibility by two complementary implementations: a generatively trained Gaussian Mixture Model as well as a discriminatively trained histogram approach. Both systems achieve state-of-the-art performance. Detections are found by gradient-based or branch and bound search, respectively. The latter greatly benefits from PRISM's feature-centric view. It thereby avoids the unfavourable memory trade-off and any on-line pre-processing of the original Efficient Subwindow Search (ESS). Moreover, our approach takes account of the features' scale value while ESS does not. Finally, we show how to avoid soft-matching and spatial pyramid descriptors during detection without losing their positive effect. This makes algorithms simpler and faster. Both are possible if the object model is properly regularised and we discuss a modification of SVMs which allows for doing so.
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paper_title: Eye localization through multiscale sparse dictionaries

paper_content:

This paper presents a new eye localization method via Multiscale Sparse Dictionaries (MSD). We built a pyramid of dictionaries that models context information at multiple scales. Eye locations are estimated at each scale by fitting the image through sparse coefficients of the dictionary. By using context information, our method is robust to various eye appearances. The method also works efficiently since it avoids sliding a search window in the image during localization. The experiments in BioID database prove the effectiveness of our method.
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paper_title: Regression and classification approaches to eye localization in face images

paper_content:

We address the task of accurately localizing the eyes in face images extracted by a face detector, an important problem to be solved because of the negative effect of poor localization on face recognition accuracy. We investigate three approaches to the task: a regression approach aiming to directly minimize errors in the predicted eye positions, a simple Bayesian model of eye and non-eye appearance, and a discriminative eye detector trained using AdaBoost. By using identical training and test data for each method we are able to perform an unbiased comparison. We show that, perhaps surprisingly, the simple Bayesian approach performs best on databases including challenging images, and performance is comparable to more complex state-of-the-art methods.
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paper_title: Online domain adaptation of a pre-trained cascade of classifiers

paper_content:

Many classifiers are trained with massive training sets only to be applied at test time on data from a different distribution. How can we rapidly and simply adapt a classifier to a new test distribution, even when we do not have access to the original training data? We present an on-line approach for rapidly adapting a “black box” classifier to a new test data set without retraining the classifier or examining the original optimization criterion. Assuming the original classifier outputs a continuous number for which a threshold gives the class, we reclassify points near the original boundary using a Gaussian process regression scheme. We show how this general procedure can be used in the context of a classifier cascade, demonstrating performance that far exceeds state-of-the-art results in face detection on a standard data set. We also draw connections to work in semi-supervised learning, domain adaptation, and information regularization.
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paper_title: A robust eye localization method for low quality face images

paper_content:

Eye localization is an important part in face recognition system, because its precision closely affects the performance of face recognition. Although various methods have already achieved high precision on the face images with high quality, their precision will drop on low quality images. In this paper, we propose a robust eye localization method for low quality face images to improve the eye detection rate and localization precision. First, we propose a probabilistic cascade (P-Cascade) framework, in which we reformulate the traditional cascade classifier in a probabilistic way. The P-Cascade can give chance to each image patch contributing to the final result, regardless the patch is accepted or rejected by the cascade. Second, we propose two extensions to further improve the robustness and precision in the P-Cascade framework. There are: (1) extending feature set, and (2) stacking two classifiers in multiple scales. Extensive experiments on JAFFE, BioID, LFW and a self-collected video surveillance database show that our method is comparable to state-of-the-art methods on high quality images and can work well on low quality images. This work supplies a solid base for face recognition applications under unconstrained or surveillance environments.
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paper_title: Pictorial Structures for Object Recognition

paper_content:

In this paper we present a computationally efficient framework for part-based modeling and recognition of objects. Our work is motivated by the pictorial structure models introduced by Fischler and Elschlager. The basic idea is to represent an object by a collection of parts arranged in a deformable configuration. The appearance of each part is modeled separately, and the deformable configuration is represented by spring-like connections between pairs of parts. These models allow for qualitative descriptions of visual appearance, and are suitable for generic recognition problems. We address the problem of using pictorial structure models to find instances of an object in an image as well as the problem of learning an object model from training examples, presenting efficient algorithms in both cases. We demonstrate the techniques by learning models that represent faces and human bodies and using the resulting models to locate the corresponding objects in novel images.
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paper_title: Automatic Facial Expression Analysis A Survey

paper_content:

The Automatic Facial Expression Recognition has been one of the latest research topic since 1990’s.There have been recent advances in detecting face, facial expression recognition and classification. There are multiple methods devised for facial feature extraction which helps in identifying face and facial expressions. This paper surveys some of the published work since 2003 till date. Various methods are analysed to identify the Facial expression. The Paper also discusses about the facial parameterization using Facial Action Coding System(FACS) action units and the methods which recognizes the action units parameters using facial expression data that are extracted. Various kinds of facial expressions are present in human face which can be identified based on their geometric features, appearance features and hybrid features . The two basic concepts of extracting features are based on facial deformation and facial motion. This article also identifies the techniques based on the characteristics of expressions and classifies the suitable methods that can be implemented.
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paper_title: Average of Synthetic Exact Filters

paper_content:

This paper introduces a class of correlation filters called average of synthetic exact filters (ASEF). For ASEF, the correlation output is completely specified for each training image. This is in marked contrast to prior methods such as synthetic discriminant functions (SDFs) which only specify a single output value per training image. Advantages of ASEF training include: insensitivity to over-fitting, greater flexibility with regard to training images, and more robust behavior in the presence of structured backgrounds. The theory and design of ASEF filters is presented using eye localization on the FERET database as an example task. ASEF is compared to other popular correlation filters including SDF, MACE, OTF, and UMACE, and with other eye localization methods including Gabor Jets and the OpenCV cascade classifier. ASEF is shown to outperform all these methods, locating the eye to within the radius of the iris approximately 98.5% of the time.
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paper_title: Eye localization in low and standard definition content with application to face matching

paper_content:

In this paper we address the problem of eye localization for the purpose of face matching in low and standard definition image and video content. In addition to an explorative study that aimed at discovering the effect of eye localization accuracy on face matching performance, we also present a probabilistic eye localization method based on well-known multi-scale local binary patterns (LBPs). These patterns provide a simple but powerful spatial description of texture, and are robust to the noise typical to low and standard definition content. The extensive evaluation involving multiple eye localizers and face matchers showed that the shape of the eye localizer error distribution has a big impact on face matching performance. Conditioned by the error distribution shape and the minimum required eye localization accuracy, eye localization can boost the performance of naive face matchers and allow for more efficient face matching without degrading its performance. The evaluation also showed that our proposed method has superior accuracy with respect to the state-of-the-art on eye localization, and that it fulfills the criteria for improving the face matching performance and efficiency mentioned above.
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paper_title: Face detection in color images

paper_content:

Human face detection is often the first step in applications such as video surveillance, human computer interface, face recognition, and image database management. We propose a face detection algorithm for color images in the presence of varying lighting conditions as well as complex backgrounds. Our method detects skin regions over the entire image, and then generates face candidates based on the spatial arrangement of these skin patches. The algorithm constructs eye, mouth, and boundary maps for verifying each face candidate. Experimental results demonstrate successful detection over a wide variety of facial variations in color, position, scale, rotation, pose, and expression from several photo collections.
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paper_title: What Is the Set of Images of an Object Under All Possible Illumination Conditions?

paper_content:

The appearance of an object depends on both the viewpoint from which it is observed and the light sources by which it is illuminated. If the appearance of two objects is never identical for any pose or lighting conditions, then–in theory–the objects can always be distinguished or recognized. The question arises: What is the set of images of an object under all lighting conditions and pose? In this paper, we consider only the set of images of an object under variable illumination, including multiple, extended light sources and shadows. We prove that the set of n-pixel images of a convex object with a Lambertian reflectance function, illuminated by an arbitrary number of point light sources at infinity, forms a convex polyhedral cone in R^n and that the dimension of this illumination cone equals the number of distinct surface normals. Furthermore, the illumination cone can be constructed from as few as three images. In addition, the set of n-pixel images of an object of any shape and with a more general reflectance function, seen under all possible illumination conditions, still forms a convex cone in R^n. Extensions of these results to color images are presented. These results immediately suggest certain approaches to object recognition. Throughout, we present results demonstrating the illumination cone representation.
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paper_title: Facial feature detection using distance vector fields

paper_content:

A novel method for eye and mouth detection and eye center and mouth corner localization, based on geometrical information is presented in this paper. First, a face detector is applied to detect the facial region, and the edge map of this region is calculated. The distance vector field of the face is extracted by assigning to every facial image pixel a vector pointing to the closest edge pixel. The x and y components of these vectors are used to detect the eyes and mouth regions. Luminance information is used for eye center localization, after removing unwanted effects, such as specular highlights, whereas the hue channel of the lip area is used for the detection of the mouth corners. The proposed method has been tested on the XM2VTS and BioID databases, with very good results.
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paper_title: Fiducial point localization in color images of face foregrounds

paper_content:

Abstract We describe a method for the automatic identification of facial features (eyes, nose, mouth and chin) and the precise localization of their fiducial points (e.g. nose tip, mouth and eye corners) in color images of face foregrounds. The algorithm requires as input 2D color images, representing face foregrounds with homogeneous background; it is scale-independent, it deals with either frontal, rotated (up to 30°) or slightly tilted (up to 10°) faces, and it is robust to different facial expressions, requiring the mouth closed and the eyes opened, and no wearing glasses. The method proceeds with subsequent refinements: first, it identifies the sub images containing each feature, afterwards, it processes the single features separately by a blend of techniques which use both color and shape information. The system has been tested on three databases: the XM2VTS database, the University of Stirling database, and ours, for a total of 1650 images. The obtained results are described quantitatively and discussed.
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paper_title: Acquiring linear subspaces for face recognition under variable lighting

paper_content:

Previous work has demonstrated that the image variation of many objects (human faces in particular) under variable lighting can be effectively modeled by low-dimensional linear spaces, even when there are multiple light sources and shadowing. Basis images spanning this space are usually obtained in one of three ways: a large set of images of the object under different lighting conditions is acquired, and principal component analysis (PCA) is used to estimate a subspace. Alternatively, synthetic images are rendered from a 3D model (perhaps reconstructed from images) under point sources and, again, PCA is used to estimate a subspace. Finally, images rendered from a 3D model under diffuse lighting based on spherical harmonics are directly used as basis images. In this paper, we show how to arrange physical lighting so that the acquired images of each object can be directly used as the basis vectors of a low-dimensional linear space and that this subspace is close to those acquired by the other methods. More specifically, there exist configurations of k point light source directions, with k typically ranging from 5 to 9, such that, by taking k images of an object under these single sources, the resulting subspace is an effective representation for recognition under a wide range of lighting conditions. Since the subspace is generated directly from real images, potentially complex and/or brittle intermediate steps such as 3D reconstruction can be completely avoided; nor is it necessary to acquire large numbers of training images or to physically construct complex diffuse (harmonic) light fields. We validate the use of subspaces constructed in this fashion within the context of face recognition.
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paper_title: Automatic eye detection using intensity filtering and K-means clustering

paper_content:

This paper proposes a novel eye detection method, which can locate the accurate positions of the eyes from frontal face images. The proposed method is robust to pose changes, different facial expressions and illumination variations. Initially, it utilizes image enhancement, Gabor transformation and cluster analysis to extract eye windows. It then localizes the pupil centers by applying two neighborhood operators within the eye windows. Experiments with the color FERET and the LFW (Labeled Face in the Wild) datasets (including a total of 3587 images) are used to evaluate this method. The experimental results demonstrate the consistent robustness and efficiency of the proposed method.
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paper_title: Combining Face and Eye Detectors in a High- Performance Face-Detection System

paper_content:

A combined face and eye detector system based on multiresolution local ternary patterns and local phase quantization descriptors can achieve noticeable performance improvements by extracting features locally.
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paper_title: Facial features detection robust to pose, illumination and identity

paper_content:

This paper addresses the problem of automatic detection of salient facial features. Face images are described using local normalized Gaussian receptive fields. Face features are learned using a clustering of the Gaussian derivative responses. We have found that a single cluster provides a robust detector for salient facial features robust to pose, illumination and identity. In this paper we describe how this cluster is learned and which facial features have found to be salient
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paper_title: Face recognition system using local autocorrelations and multiscale integration

paper_content:

In this paper we investigate the performance of a technique for face recognition based on the computation of 25 local autocorrelation coefficients. We use a large database of 11,600 frontal facial images of 116 persons, organized in training and test sets, for evaluation. Autocorrelation coefficients are computationally inexpensive, inherently shift-invariant and quite robust against changes in facial expression. We focus on the difficult problem of recognizing a large number of known human faces while rejecting other, unknown faces which lie quite close in pattern space. A multiresolution system achieves a recognition rate of 95%, while falsely accepting only 1.5% of unknown faces. It operates at a speed of about one face per second. Without rejection of unknown faces, we obtain a peak recognition rate of 99.9%. The good performance indicates that local autocorrelation coefficients have a surprisingly high information content.
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paper_title: A novel pupil localization method based on GaborEye model and radial symmetry operator

paper_content:

The eyes are the most important facial landmarks on the human face. The accuracy of face normalization, which is critical to the performance of the following face analysis steps, depends on the locations of the two eyes, as well as their relatively constant interocular distance. In this paper, we propose a novel GaborEye model for eye localization. Based on the special gray distribution in the eye-and-brow region, a proper Gabor kernel is adaptively chosen to convolute with the face image to highlight the eye-and-brow region, which can be exploited to segment the two pupil regions efficiently. After getting the region of the pupil, a fast radial symmetry operator is used to locate the center of the pupil. Extensive experiments show that the method can accurately locate the pupils, and it is robust to the variations of face poses, expressions, accessories and illuminations.
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paper_title: Robust precise eye location under probabilistic framework

paper_content:

Eye feature location is an important step in automatic visual interpretation and human face recognition. In this paper, a novel approach for locating eye centers in face areas under probabilistic framework is devised. After grossly locating a face, we first find the areas which left and right eyes lies in. Then an appearance-based eye detector is used to detect the possible left and right eye separately. According to their probabilities, the candidates are subsampled to merge those in near positions. Finally, the remaining left and right eye candidates are paired; each possible eye pair is normalized and verified. According to their probabilities, the precise eye positions are decided. The experimental results demonstrate that our method can effectively cope with different eye variations and achieve better location performance on diverse test sets than some newly proposed methods. And the influence of precision of eye location on face recognition is also probed. The location of other face organs such as mouth and nose can be incorporated in the framework easily.
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paper_title: A pupil localization algorithm based on adaptive Gabor filtering and negative radial symmetry

paper_content:

The pupil localization algorithm is very important for a face recognition system. Traditional pupil localization algorithms are easy to be affected by uneven illuminations and accessories. Aiming at those limitations, a novel pupil localization algorithm is proposed in this paper. The algorithm firstly implements face image tilt adjustment and extracts eye region through the horizontal intensity gradient integral projection and Gabor filtering. Then in order to increase the eye detection accuracy, PCA is applied to select Gabor filter, and the projection enhancement algorithm is presented. At last the Negative Radial Symmetry is presented to locate the pupil position precisely in eye windows. Experimental results show that the method can locate the pupil position accurately, and demonstrate robustness to uneven lighting, noise, accessories and pose variations.
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paper_title: Face Recognition: The Problem of Compensating for Changes in Illumination Direction

paper_content:

A face recognition system must recognize a face from a novel image despite the variations between images of the same face. A common approach to overcoming image variations because of changes in the illumination conditions is to use image representations that are relatively insensitive to these variations. Examples of such representations are edge maps, image intensity derivatives, and images convolved with 2D Gabor-like filters. Here we present an empirical study that evaluates the sensitivity of these representations to changes in illumination, as well as viewpoint and facial expression. Our findings indicated that none of the representations considered is sufficient by itself to overcome image variations because of a change in the direction of illumination. Similar results were obtained for changes due to viewpoint and expression. Image representations that emphasized the horizontal features were found to be less sensitive to changes in the direction of illumination. However, systems based only on such representations failed to recognize up to 20 percent of the faces in our database. Humans performed considerably better under the same conditions. We discuss possible reasons for this superiority and alternative methods for overcoming illumination effects in recognition.
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paper_title: Blur insensitive texture classification using local phase quantization

paper_content:

In this paper, we propose a new descriptor for texture classification that is robust to image blurring. The descriptor utilizes phase information computed locally in a window for every image position. The phases of the four low-frequency coefficients are decorrelated and uniformly quantized in an eight-dimensional space. A histogram of the resulting code words is created and used as a feature in texture classification. Ideally, the low-frequency phase components are shown to be invariant to centrally symmetric blur. Although this ideal invariance is not completely achieved due to the finite window size, the method is still highly insensitive to blur. Because only phase information is used, the method is also invariant to uniform illumination changes. According to our experiments, the classification accuracy of blurred texture images is much higher with the new method than with the well-known LBP or Gabor filter bank methods. Interestingly, it is also slightly better for textures that are not blurred.
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paper_title: Frontal-view face detection and facial feature extraction using color and morphological operations

paper_content:

A novel algorithm for front-view facial contour detection and features extraction is described. A skin-color face segmentation method is developed to detect the face region firstly. In order to more precisely locate the face contour and features such as eyes, mouth and nostrils, we eliminate the ears and neck from the face region by using morphological operations and knowledge about the face structure. We have found some consistent rules that can be used to locate some contour points from the skeleton of the processed frontal face region. The face contour can then be fitted as an ellipse using these points. Then the facial features can be located in the interior of the face contour. Experiments have been done with a number of images of frontal view of the head including some with a slight pan obtained from an Internet face database (University of Stirling). Also a number of face images captured by a color CCD camera are tried by our method. The robustness is confirmed with correct detection rate of over 90%.
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paper_title: Enhanced Local Texture Feature Sets for Face Recognition Under Difficult Lighting Conditions

paper_content:

Making recognition more reliable under uncontrolled lighting conditions is one of the most important challenges for practical face recognition systems. We tackle this by combining the strengths of robust illumination normalization, local texture-based face representations, distance transform based matching, kernel-based feature extraction and multiple feature fusion. Specifically, we make three main contributions: 1) we present a simple and efficient preprocessing chain that eliminates most of the effects of changing illumination while still preserving the essential appearance details that are needed for recognition; 2) we introduce local ternary patterns (LTP), a generalization of the local binary pattern (LBP) local texture descriptor that is more discriminant and less sensitive to noise in uniform regions, and we show that replacing comparisons based on local spatial histograms with a distance transform based similarity metric further improves the performance of LBP/LTP based face recognition; and 3) we further improve robustness by adding Kernel principal component analysis (PCA) feature extraction and incorporating rich local appearance cues from two complementary sources-Gabor wavelets and LBP-showing that the combination is considerably more accurate than either feature set alone. The resulting method provides state-of-the-art performance on three data sets that are widely used for testing recognition under difficult illumination conditions: Extended Yale-B, CAS-PEAL-R1, and Face Recognition Grand Challenge version 2 experiment 4 (FRGC-204). For example, on the challenging FRGC-204 data set it halves the error rate relative to previously published methods, achieving a face verification rate of 88.1% at 0.1% false accept rate. Further experiments show that our preprocessing method outperforms several existing preprocessors for a range of feature sets, data sets and lighting conditions.
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paper_title: Robust Facial Features Localization on Rotation Arbitrary Multi-View Face in Complex Background

paper_content:

Focused on facial features localization on multi-view face arbitrarily rotated in plane, a novel detection algorithm based improved SVM is proposed. First, the face is located by the rotation invariant multi-view (RIMV) face detector and its pose in plane is corrected by rotation. After the searching ranges of the facial features are determined, the crossing detection method which uses the brow-eye and nose-mouth features and the improved SVM detectors trained by large scale multi-view facial features examples is adopted to find the candidate eye, nose and mouth regions,. Based on the fact that the window region with higher value in the SVM discriminant function is relatively closer to the object, and the same object tends to be repeatedly detected by near windows, the candidate eyes, nose and mouth regions are filtered and merged to refine their location on the multi-view face. Experiments show that the algorithm has very good accuracy and robustness to the facial features localization with expression and arbitrary face pose in complex background.
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paper_title: Face recognition: features versus templates

paper_content:

Two new algorithms for computer recognition of human faces, one based on the computation of a set of geometrical features, such as nose width and length, mouth position, and chin shape, and the second based on almost-gray-level template matching, are presented. The results obtained for the testing sets show about 90% correct recognition using geometrical features and perfect recognition using template matching. >
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paper_title: A multiscale retinex for bridging the gap between color images and the human observation of scenes

paper_content:

Direct observation and recorded color images of the same scenes are often strikingly different because human visual perception computes the conscious representation with vivid color and detail in shadows, and with resistance to spectral shifts in the scene illuminant. A computation for color images that approaches fidelity to scene observation must combine dynamic range compression, color consistency-a computational analog for human vision color constancy-and color and lightness tonal rendition. In this paper, we extend a previously designed single-scale center/surround retinex to a multiscale version that achieves simultaneous dynamic range compression/color consistency/lightness rendition. This extension fails to produce good color rendition for a class of images that contain violations of the gray-world assumption implicit to the theoretical foundation of the retinex. Therefore, we define a method of color restoration that corrects for this deficiency at the cost of a modest dilution in color consistency. Extensive testing of the multiscale retinex with color restoration on several test scenes and over a hundred images did not reveal any pathological behaviour.
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paper_title: Unsupervised Joint Alignment of Complex Images

paper_content:

Many recognition algorithms depend on careful positioning of an object into a canonical pose, so the position of features relative to a fixed coordinate system can be examined. Currently, this positioning is done either manually or by training a class-specialized learning algorithm with samples of the class that have been hand-labeled with parts or poses. In this paper, we describe a novel method to achieve this positioning using poorly aligned examples of a class with no additional labeling. Given a set of unaligned examplars of a class, such as faces, we automatically build an alignment mechanism, without any additional labeling of parts or poses in the data set. Using this alignment mechanism, new members of the class, such as faces resulting from a face detector, can be precisely aligned for the recognition process. Our alignment method improves performance on a face recognition task, both over unaligned images and over images aligned with a face alignment algorithm specifically developed for and trained on hand-labeled face images. We also demonstrate its use on an entirely different class of objects (cars), again without providing any information about parts or pose to the learning algorithm.
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paper_title: Facial expression recognition - A real time approach

paper_content:

Face localization, feature extraction, and modeling are the major issues in automatic facial expression recognition. In this paper, a method for facial expression recognition is proposed. A face is located by extracting the head contour points using the motion information. A rectangular bounding box is fitted for the face region using those extracted contour points. Among the facial features, eyes are the most prominent features used for determining the size of a face. Hence eyes are located and the visual features of a face are extracted based on the locations of eyes. The visual features are modeled using support vector machine (SVM) for facial expression recognition. The SVM finds an optimal hyperplane to distinguish different facial expressions with an accuracy of 98.5%.
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paper_title: An Image Preprocessing Algorithm for Illumination Invariant Face Recognition

paper_content:

Face recognition algorithms have to deal with significant amounts of illumination variations between gallery and probe images. State-of-the-art commercial face recognition algorithms still struggle with this problem. We propose a new image preprocessing algorithm that compensates for illumination variations in images. From a single brightness image the algorithm first estimates the illumination field and then compensates for it to mostly recover the scene reflectance. Unlike previously proposed approaches for illumination compensation, our algorithm does not require any training steps, knowledge of 3D face models or reflective surface models. We apply the algorithm to face images prior to recognition. We demonstrate large performance improvements with several standard face recognition algorithms across multiple, publicly available face databases.
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paper_title: Face Recognition by Elastic Bunch Graph Matching

paper_content:

We present a system for recognizing human faces from single images out of a large database with one image per person. The task is difficult because of image variation in terms of position, size, expression, and pose. The system collapses most of this variance by extracting concise face descriptions in the form of image graphs. In these, fiducial points on the face (eyes, mouth etc.) are described by sets of wavelet components (jets). Image graph extraction is based on a novel approach, the bunch graph, which is constructed from a small set of sample image graphs. Recognition is based on a straight-forward comparison of image graphs. We report recognition experiments on the FERET database and the Bochum database, including recognition across pose.
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paper_title: Average of Synthetic Exact Filters

paper_content:

This paper introduces a class of correlation filters called average of synthetic exact filters (ASEF). For ASEF, the correlation output is completely specified for each training image. This is in marked contrast to prior methods such as synthetic discriminant functions (SDFs) which only specify a single output value per training image. Advantages of ASEF training include: insensitivity to over-fitting, greater flexibility with regard to training images, and more robust behavior in the presence of structured backgrounds. The theory and design of ASEF filters is presented using eye localization on the FERET database as an example task. ASEF is compared to other popular correlation filters including SDF, MACE, OTF, and UMACE, and with other eye localization methods including Gabor Jets and the OpenCV cascade classifier. ASEF is shown to outperform all these methods, locating the eye to within the radius of the iris approximately 98.5% of the time.
---
paper_title: Automatic Eye Detection and Its Validation

paper_content:

The accuracy of face alignment affects the performance of a face recognition system. Since face alignment is usually conducted using eye positions, an accurate eye localization algorithm is therefore essential for accurate face recognition. In this paper, we first study the impact of eye locations on face recognition accuracy, and then introduce an automatic technique for eye detection. The performance of our automatic eye detection technique is subsequently validated using FRGC 1.0 database. The validation shows that our eye detector has an overall 94.5% eye detection rate, with the detected eyes very close to the manually provided eye positions. In addition, the face recognition performance based on the automatic eye detection is shown to be comparable to that of using manually given eye positions.
---
paper_title: Unconstrained correlation filters.

paper_content:

A mathematical analysis of the distortion tolerance in correlation filters is presented. A good measure for distortion performance is shown to be a generalization of the minimum average correlation energy criterion. To optimize the filter's performance, we remove the usual hard constraints on the outputs in the synthetic discriminant function formulation. The resulting filters exhibit superior distortion tolerance while retaining the attractive features of their predecessors such as the minimum average correlation energy filter and the minimum variance synthetic discriminant function filter. The proposed theory also unifies several existing approaches and examines the relationship between different formulations. The proposed filter design algorithm requires only simple statistical parameters and the inversion of diagonal matrices, which makes it attractive from a computational standpoint. Several properties of these filters are discussed with illustrative examples.
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paper_title: Human detection in images via L1-norm Minimization Learning

paper_content:

In recent years, sparse representation originating from signal compressed sensing theory has attracted increasing interest in computer vision research community. However, to our best knowledge, no previous work utilizes L1-norm minimization for human detection. In this paper we develop a novel human detection system based on L1-norm Minimization Learning (LML) method. The method is on the observation that a human object can be represented by a few features from a large feature set (sparse representation). And the sparse representation can be learned from the training samples by exploiting the L1-norm Minimization principle, which can also be called feature selection procedure. This procedure enables the feature representation more concise and more adaptive to object occlusion and deformation. After that a classifier is constructed by linearly weighting features and comparing the result with a calculated threshold. Experiments on two datasets validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method.
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paper_title: Spatio-temporal Saliency detection using phase spectrum of quaternion fourier transform

paper_content:

Salient areas in natural scenes are generally regarded as the candidates of attention focus in human eyes, which is the key stage in object detection. In computer vision, many models have been proposed to simulate the behavior of eyes such as SaliencyToolBox (STB), neuromorphic vision toolkit (NVT) and etc., but they demand high computational cost and their remarkable results mostly rely on the choice of parameters. Recently a simple and fast approach based on Fourier transform called spectral residual (SR) was proposed, which used SR of the amplitude spectrum to obtain the saliency map. The results are good, but the reason is questionable.
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paper_title: Minimum average correlation energy filters

paper_content:

The synthesis of a new category of spatial filters that produces sharp output correlation peaks with controlled peak values is considered. The sharp nature of the correlation peak is the major feature emphasized, since it facilitates target detection. Since these filters minimize the average correlation plane energy as the first step in filter synthesis, we refer to them as minimum average correlation energy filters. Experimental laboratory results from optical implementation of the filters are also presented and discussed.
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paper_title: PRECISE EYE AND MOUTH LOCALIZATION

paper_content:

The literature on the topic has shown a strong correlation between the degree of precision of face localization and the face recognition performance. Hence, there is a need for precise facial feature detectors, as well as objective measures for their evaluation and comparison. In this paper, we will present significant improvements to a previous method for precise eye center localization, by integrating a module for mouth localization. The technique is based on Support Vector Machines trained on optimally chosen Haar wavelet coefficients. The method has been tested on several public databases; the results are reported and compared according to a standard error measure. The tests show that the algorithm achieves high precision of localization.
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paper_title: On Mixtures of Linear SVMs for Nonlinear Classification

paper_content:

In this paper, we propose a new method for training mixtures of linear SVM classifiers for purposes of non-linear data classification. We do this by packaging linear SVMs into a probabilistic formulation and embedding them in the mixture of experts model. The weights of the mixture model are generated by the gating network dependent on the input data. The new mixture of linear SVMs can be then trained efficiently using the EM algorithm. Unlike previous SVM-based mixture of expert models, which use a divide-and-conquer strategy to reduce the burden of training for large scale data sets, the main purpose of our approach is to improve the efficiency for testing. Experimental results show that our proposed model can achieve the efficiency of linear classifiers in the prediction phase while still maintaining the classification performance of nonlinear classifiers.
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paper_title: Deformable model fitting with a mixture of local experts

paper_content:

Local experts have been used to great effect for fitting deformable models to images. Typically, the best location in an image for the deformable model's landmarks are found through a locally exhaustive search using these experts. In order to achieve efficient fitting, these experts should afford an efficient evaluation, which often leads to forms with restricted discriminative capacity. In this work, a framework is proposed in which multiple simple experts can be utilized to increase the capacity of the detections overall. In particular, the use of a mixture of linear classifiers is proposed, the computational complexity of which scales linearly with the number of mixture components. The fitting objective is maximized using the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm, where approximations to the true objective are made in order to facilitate efficient and numerically stable fitting. The efficacy of the proposed approach is evaluated on the task of generic face fitting where performance improvement is observed over two existing methods.
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paper_title: Visual routines for eye location using learning and evolution

paper_content:

Eye location is used as a test bed for developing navigation routines implemented as visual routines within the framework of adaptive behavior-based AI. The adaptive eye location approach seeks first where salient objects are, and then what their identity is. Specifically, eye location involves: 1) the derivation of the saliency attention map, and 2) the possible classification of salient locations as eve regions. The saliency ("where") map is derived using a consensus between navigation routines encoded as finite-state automata exploring the facial landscape and evolved using genetic algorithms (GAs). The classification ("what") stage is concerned with the optimal selection of features, and the derivation of decision trees, using GAs, to possibly classify salient locations as eyes. The experimental results, using facial image data, show the feasibility of our method, and suggest a novel approach for the adaptive development of task-driven active perception and navigational mechanisms.
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paper_title: Precise eye localization through a general-to-specific model definition

paper_content:

We present a method for precise eye localization that uses two Support Vector Machines trained on properly selected Haar wavelet coefficients. The evaluation of our technique on many standard databases exhibits very good performance. Furthermore, we study the strong correlation between the eye localization error and the face recognition rate.
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paper_title: Beyond sliding windows: Object localization by efficient subwindow search

paper_content:

Most successful object recognition systems rely on binary classification, deciding only if an object is present or not, but not providing information on the actual object location. To perform localization, one can take a sliding window approach, but this strongly increases the computational cost, because the classifier function has to be evaluated over a large set of candidate subwindows. In this paper, we propose a simple yet powerful branch-and-bound scheme that allows efficient maximization of a large class of classifier functions over all possible subimages. It converges to a globally optimal solution typically in sublinear time. We show how our method is applicable to different object detection and retrieval scenarios. The achieved speedup allows the use of classifiers for localization that formerly were considered too slow for this task, such as SVMs with a spatial pyramid kernel or nearest neighbor classifiers based on the chi2-distance. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance of the resulting systems on the UIUC Cars dataset, the PASCAL VOC 2006 dataset and in the PASCAL VOC 2007 competition.
---
paper_title: Fast PRISM: Branch and Bound Hough Transform for Object Class Detection

paper_content:

This paper addresses the task of efficient object class detection by means of the Hough transform. This approach has been made popular by the Implicit Shape Model (ISM) and has been adopted many times. Although ISM exhibits robust detection performance, its probabilistic formulation is unsatisfactory. The PRincipled Implicit Shape Model (PRISM) overcomes these problems by interpreting Hough voting as a dual implementation of linear sliding-window detection. It thereby gives a sound justification to the voting procedure and imposes minimal constraints. We demonstrate PRISM's flexibility by two complementary implementations: a generatively trained Gaussian Mixture Model as well as a discriminatively trained histogram approach. Both systems achieve state-of-the-art performance. Detections are found by gradient-based or branch and bound search, respectively. The latter greatly benefits from PRISM's feature-centric view. It thereby avoids the unfavourable memory trade-off and any on-line pre-processing of the original Efficient Subwindow Search (ESS). Moreover, our approach takes account of the features' scale value while ESS does not. Finally, we show how to avoid soft-matching and spatial pyramid descriptors during detection without losing their positive effect. This makes algorithms simpler and faster. Both are possible if the object model is properly regularised and we discuss a modification of SVMs which allows for doing so.
---
paper_title: Automatic Eye Detection and Its Validation

paper_content:

The accuracy of face alignment affects the performance of a face recognition system. Since face alignment is usually conducted using eye positions, an accurate eye localization algorithm is therefore essential for accurate face recognition. In this paper, we first study the impact of eye locations on face recognition accuracy, and then introduce an automatic technique for eye detection. The performance of our automatic eye detection technique is subsequently validated using FRGC 1.0 database. The validation shows that our eye detector has an overall 94.5% eye detection rate, with the detected eyes very close to the manually provided eye positions. In addition, the face recognition performance based on the automatic eye detection is shown to be comparable to that of using manually given eye positions.
---
paper_title: Convolutional face finder: a neural architecture for fast and robust face detection

paper_content:

In this paper, we present a novel face detection approach based on a convolutional neural architecture, designed to robustly detect highly variable face patterns, rotated up to /spl plusmn/20 degrees in image plane and turned up to /spl plusmn/60 degrees, in complex real world images. The proposed system automatically synthesizes simple problem-specific feature extractors from a training set of face and nonface patterns, without making any assumptions or using any hand-made design concerning the features to extract or the areas of the face pattern to analyze. The face detection procedure acts like a pipeline of simple convolution and subsampling modules that treat the raw input image as a whole. We therefore show that an efficient face detection system does not require any costly local preprocessing before classification of image areas. The proposed scheme provides very high detection rate with a particularly low level of false positives, demonstrated on difficult test sets, without requiring the use of multiple networks for handling difficult cases. We present extensive experimental results illustrating the efficiency of the proposed approach on difficult test sets and including an in-depth sensitivity analysis with respect to the degrees of variability of the face patterns.
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paper_title: Robust precise eye location by adaboost and SVM techniques

paper_content:

This paper presents a novel approach for eye detection using a hierarchy cascade classifier based on Adaboost statistical learning method combined with SVM (Support Vector Machines) post classifier. On the first stage a face detector is used to locate the face in the whole image. After finding the face, an eye detector is used to detect the possible eye candidates within the face areas. Finally, the precise eye positions are decided by the eye-pair SVM classifiers which using geometrical and relative position information of eye-pair and the face. Experimental results show that this method can effectively cope with various image conditions and achieve better location performance on diverse test sets than some newly proposed methods.
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paper_title: Robust Object Detection with Interleaved Categorization and Segmentation

paper_content:

This paper presents a novel method for detecting and localizing objects of a visual category in cluttered real-world scenes. Our approach considers object categorization and figure-ground segmentation as two interleaved processes that closely collaborate towards a common goal. As shown in our work, the tight coupling between those two processes allows them to benefit from each other and improve the combined performance. ::: ::: The core part of our approach is a highly flexible learned representation for object shape that can combine the information observed on different training examples in a probabilistic extension of the Generalized Hough Transform. The resulting approach can detect categorical objects in novel images and automatically infer a probabilistic segmentation from the recognition result. This segmentation is then in turn used to again improve recognition by allowing the system to focus its efforts on object pixels and to discard misleading influences from the background. Moreover, the information from where in the image a hypothesis draws its support is employed in an MDL based hypothesis verification stage to resolve ambiguities between overlapping hypotheses and factor out the effects of partial occlusion. ::: ::: An extensive evaluation on several large data sets shows that the proposed system is applicable to a range of different object categories, including both rigid and articulated objects. In addition, its flexible representation allows it to achieve competitive object detection performance already from training sets that are between one and two orders of magnitude smaller than those used in comparable systems.
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paper_title: Facial features detection robust to pose, illumination and identity

paper_content:

This paper addresses the problem of automatic detection of salient facial features. Face images are described using local normalized Gaussian receptive fields. Face features are learned using a clustering of the Gaussian derivative responses. We have found that a single cluster provides a robust detector for salient facial features robust to pose, illumination and identity. In this paper we describe how this cluster is learned and which facial features have found to be salient
---
paper_title: Robust precise eye location under probabilistic framework

paper_content:

Eye feature location is an important step in automatic visual interpretation and human face recognition. In this paper, a novel approach for locating eye centers in face areas under probabilistic framework is devised. After grossly locating a face, we first find the areas which left and right eyes lies in. Then an appearance-based eye detector is used to detect the possible left and right eye separately. According to their probabilities, the candidates are subsampled to merge those in near positions. Finally, the remaining left and right eye candidates are paired; each possible eye pair is normalized and verified. According to their probabilities, the precise eye positions are decided. The experimental results demonstrate that our method can effectively cope with different eye variations and achieve better location performance on diverse test sets than some newly proposed methods. And the influence of precision of eye location on face recognition is also probed. The location of other face organs such as mouth and nose can be incorporated in the framework easily.
---
paper_title: Fast PRISM: Branch and Bound Hough Transform for Object Class Detection

paper_content:

This paper addresses the task of efficient object class detection by means of the Hough transform. This approach has been made popular by the Implicit Shape Model (ISM) and has been adopted many times. Although ISM exhibits robust detection performance, its probabilistic formulation is unsatisfactory. The PRincipled Implicit Shape Model (PRISM) overcomes these problems by interpreting Hough voting as a dual implementation of linear sliding-window detection. It thereby gives a sound justification to the voting procedure and imposes minimal constraints. We demonstrate PRISM's flexibility by two complementary implementations: a generatively trained Gaussian Mixture Model as well as a discriminatively trained histogram approach. Both systems achieve state-of-the-art performance. Detections are found by gradient-based or branch and bound search, respectively. The latter greatly benefits from PRISM's feature-centric view. It thereby avoids the unfavourable memory trade-off and any on-line pre-processing of the original Efficient Subwindow Search (ESS). Moreover, our approach takes account of the features' scale value while ESS does not. Finally, we show how to avoid soft-matching and spatial pyramid descriptors during detection without losing their positive effect. This makes algorithms simpler and faster. Both are possible if the object model is properly regularised and we discuss a modification of SVMs which allows for doing so.
---
paper_title: Regression and classification approaches to eye localization in face images

paper_content:

We address the task of accurately localizing the eyes in face images extracted by a face detector, an important problem to be solved because of the negative effect of poor localization on face recognition accuracy. We investigate three approaches to the task: a regression approach aiming to directly minimize errors in the predicted eye positions, a simple Bayesian model of eye and non-eye appearance, and a discriminative eye detector trained using AdaBoost. By using identical training and test data for each method we are able to perform an unbiased comparison. We show that, perhaps surprisingly, the simple Bayesian approach performs best on databases including challenging images, and performance is comparable to more complex state-of-the-art methods.
---
paper_title: Feature-based affine-invariant localization of faces

paper_content:

We present a novel method for localizing faces in person identification scenarios. Such scenarios involve high resolution images of frontal faces. The proposed algorithm does not require color, copes well in cluttered backgrounds, and accurately localizes faces including eye centers. An extensive analysis and a performance evaluation on the XM2VTS database and on the realistic BioID and BANCA face databases is presented. We show that the algorithm has precision superior to reference methods.
---
paper_title: Annotated Facial Landmarks in the Wild: A large-scale, real-world database for facial landmark localization

paper_content:

Face alignment is a crucial step in face recognition tasks. Especially, using landmark localization for geometric face normalization has shown to be very effective, clearly improving the recognition results. However, no adequate databases exist that provide a sufficient number of annotated facial landmarks. The databases are either limited to frontal views, provide only a small number of annotated images or have been acquired under controlled conditions. Hence, we introduce a novel database overcoming these limitations: Annotated Facial Landmarks in the Wild (AFLW). AFLW provides a large-scale collection of images gathered from Flickr, exhibiting a large variety in face appearance (e.g., pose, expression, ethnicity, age, gender) as well as general imaging and environmental conditions. In total 25,993 faces in 21,997 real-world images are annotated with up to 21 landmarks per image. Due to the comprehensive set of annotations AFLW is well suited to train and test algorithms for multi-view face detection, facial landmark localization and face pose estimation. Further, we offer a rich set of tools that ease the integration of other face databases and associated annotations into our joint framework.
---
paper_title: Automatic Eye Detection and Its Validation

paper_content:

The accuracy of face alignment affects the performance of a face recognition system. Since face alignment is usually conducted using eye positions, an accurate eye localization algorithm is therefore essential for accurate face recognition. In this paper, we first study the impact of eye locations on face recognition accuracy, and then introduce an automatic technique for eye detection. The performance of our automatic eye detection technique is subsequently validated using FRGC 1.0 database. The validation shows that our eye detector has an overall 94.5% eye detection rate, with the detected eyes very close to the manually provided eye positions. In addition, the face recognition performance based on the automatic eye detection is shown to be comparable to that of using manually given eye positions.
---
paper_title: Robust Face Detection Using the Hausdorff Distance

paper_content:

The localization of human faces in digital images is a fundamental step in the process of face recognition. This paper presents a shape comparison approach to achieve fast, accurate face detection that is robust to changes in illumination and background. The proposed method is edge-based and works on grayscale still images. The Hausdorff distance is used as a similarity measure between a general face model and possible instances of the object within the image. The paper describes an efficient implementation, making this approach suitable for real-time applications. A two-step process that allows both coarse detection and exact localization of faces is presented. Experiments were performed on a large test set base and rated with a new validation measurement.
---
paper_title: Regression and classification approaches to eye localization in face images

paper_content:

We address the task of accurately localizing the eyes in face images extracted by a face detector, an important problem to be solved because of the negative effect of poor localization on face recognition accuracy. We investigate three approaches to the task: a regression approach aiming to directly minimize errors in the predicted eye positions, a simple Bayesian model of eye and non-eye appearance, and a discriminative eye detector trained using AdaBoost. By using identical training and test data for each method we are able to perform an unbiased comparison. We show that, perhaps surprisingly, the simple Bayesian approach performs best on databases including challenging images, and performance is comparable to more complex state-of-the-art methods.
---
paper_title: Annotated Facial Landmarks in the Wild: A large-scale, real-world database for facial landmark localization

paper_content:

Face alignment is a crucial step in face recognition tasks. Especially, using landmark localization for geometric face normalization has shown to be very effective, clearly improving the recognition results. However, no adequate databases exist that provide a sufficient number of annotated facial landmarks. The databases are either limited to frontal views, provide only a small number of annotated images or have been acquired under controlled conditions. Hence, we introduce a novel database overcoming these limitations: Annotated Facial Landmarks in the Wild (AFLW). AFLW provides a large-scale collection of images gathered from Flickr, exhibiting a large variety in face appearance (e.g., pose, expression, ethnicity, age, gender) as well as general imaging and environmental conditions. In total 25,993 faces in 21,997 real-world images are annotated with up to 21 landmarks per image. Due to the comprehensive set of annotations AFLW is well suited to train and test algorithms for multi-view face detection, facial landmark localization and face pose estimation. Further, we offer a rich set of tools that ease the integration of other face databases and associated annotations into our joint framework.
---
paper_title: Overview of the face recognition grand challenge

paper_content:

Over the last couple of years, face recognition researchers have been developing new techniques. These developments are being fueled by advances in computer vision techniques, computer design, sensor design, and interest in fielding face recognition systems. Such advances hold the promise of reducing the error rate in face recognition systems by an order of magnitude over Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT) 2002 results. The face recognition grand challenge (FRGC) is designed to achieve this performance goal by presenting to researchers a six-experiment challenge problem along with data corpus of 50,000 images. The data consists of 3D scans and high resolution still imagery taken under controlled and uncontrolled conditions. This paper describes the challenge problem, data corpus, and presents baseline performance and preliminary results on natural statistics of facial imagery.
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paper_title: Face recognition: A literature survey

paper_content:

As one of the most successful applications of image analysis and understanding, face recognition has recently received significant attention, especially during the past several years. At least two reasons account for this trend: the first is the wide range of commercial and law enforcement applications, and the second is the availability of feasible technologies after 30 years of research. Even though current machine recognition systems have reached a certain level of maturity, their success is limited by the conditions imposed by many real applications. For example, recognition of face images acquired in an outdoor environment with changes in illumination and/or pose remains a largely unsolved problem. In other words, current systems are still far away from the capability of the human perception system.This paper provides an up-to-date critical survey of still- and video-based face recognition research. There are two underlying motivations for us to write this survey paper: the first is to provide an up-to-date review of the existing literature, and the second is to offer some insights into the studies of machine recognition of faces. To provide a comprehensive survey, we not only categorize existing recognition techniques but also present detailed descriptions of representative methods within each category. In addition, relevant topics such as psychophysical studies, system evaluation, and issues of illumination and pose variation are covered.
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paper_title: Robust precise eye location by adaboost and SVM techniques

paper_content:

This paper presents a novel approach for eye detection using a hierarchy cascade classifier based on Adaboost statistical learning method combined with SVM (Support Vector Machines) post classifier. On the first stage a face detector is used to locate the face in the whole image. After finding the face, an eye detector is used to detect the possible eye candidates within the face areas. Finally, the precise eye positions are decided by the eye-pair SVM classifiers which using geometrical and relative position information of eye-pair and the face. Experimental results show that this method can effectively cope with various image conditions and achieve better location performance on diverse test sets than some newly proposed methods.
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paper_title: Robust precise eye location under probabilistic framework

paper_content:

Eye feature location is an important step in automatic visual interpretation and human face recognition. In this paper, a novel approach for locating eye centers in face areas under probabilistic framework is devised. After grossly locating a face, we first find the areas which left and right eyes lies in. Then an appearance-based eye detector is used to detect the possible left and right eye separately. According to their probabilities, the candidates are subsampled to merge those in near positions. Finally, the remaining left and right eye candidates are paired; each possible eye pair is normalized and verified. According to their probabilities, the precise eye positions are decided. The experimental results demonstrate that our method can effectively cope with different eye variations and achieve better location performance on diverse test sets than some newly proposed methods. And the influence of precision of eye location on face recognition is also probed. The location of other face organs such as mouth and nose can be incorporated in the framework easily.
---
paper_title: FaceTracer: A Search Engine for Large Collections of Images with Faces

paper_content:

We have created the first image search engine based entirely on faces. Using simple text queries such as "smiling men with blond hair and mustaches," users can search through over 3.1 million faces which have been automatically labeled on the basis of several facial attributes. Faces in our database have been extracted and aligned from images downloaded from the internet using a commercial face detector, and the number of images and attributes continues to grow daily. Our classification approach uses a novel combination of Support Vector Machines and Adaboost which exploits the strong structure of faces to select and train on the optimal set of features for each attribute. We show state-of-the-art classification results compared to previous works, and demonstrate the power of our architecture through a functional, large-scale face search engine. Our framework is fully automatic, easy to scale, and computes all labels off-line, leading to fast on-line search performance. In addition, we describe how our system can be used for a number of applications, including law enforcement, social networks, and personal photo management. Our search engine will soon be made publicly available.
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paper_title: The FERET evaluation methodology for face-recognition algorithms

paper_content:

Two of the most critical requirements in support of producing reliable face-recognition systems are a large database of facial images and a testing procedure to evaluate systems. The Face Recognition Technology (FERET) program has addressed both issues through the FERET database of facial images and the establishment of the FERET tests. To date, 14,126 images from 1199 individuals are included in the FERET database, which is divided into development and sequestered portions. In September 1996, the FERET program administered the third in a series of FERET face-recognition tests. The primary objectives of the third test were to (1) assess the state of the art, (2) identify future areas of research, and (3) measure algorithm performance on large databases.
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paper_title: Average of Synthetic Exact Filters

paper_content:

This paper introduces a class of correlation filters called average of synthetic exact filters (ASEF). For ASEF, the correlation output is completely specified for each training image. This is in marked contrast to prior methods such as synthetic discriminant functions (SDFs) which only specify a single output value per training image. Advantages of ASEF training include: insensitivity to over-fitting, greater flexibility with regard to training images, and more robust behavior in the presence of structured backgrounds. The theory and design of ASEF filters is presented using eye localization on the FERET database as an example task. ASEF is compared to other popular correlation filters including SDF, MACE, OTF, and UMACE, and with other eye localization methods including Gabor Jets and the OpenCV cascade classifier. ASEF is shown to outperform all these methods, locating the eye to within the radius of the iris approximately 98.5% of the time.
---
paper_title: Annotated Facial Landmarks in the Wild: A large-scale, real-world database for facial landmark localization

paper_content:

Face alignment is a crucial step in face recognition tasks. Especially, using landmark localization for geometric face normalization has shown to be very effective, clearly improving the recognition results. However, no adequate databases exist that provide a sufficient number of annotated facial landmarks. The databases are either limited to frontal views, provide only a small number of annotated images or have been acquired under controlled conditions. Hence, we introduce a novel database overcoming these limitations: Annotated Facial Landmarks in the Wild (AFLW). AFLW provides a large-scale collection of images gathered from Flickr, exhibiting a large variety in face appearance (e.g., pose, expression, ethnicity, age, gender) as well as general imaging and environmental conditions. In total 25,993 faces in 21,997 real-world images are annotated with up to 21 landmarks per image. Due to the comprehensive set of annotations AFLW is well suited to train and test algorithms for multi-view face detection, facial landmark localization and face pose estimation. Further, we offer a rich set of tools that ease the integration of other face databases and associated annotations into our joint framework.
---
paper_title: Automatic Eye Detection and Its Validation

paper_content:

The accuracy of face alignment affects the performance of a face recognition system. Since face alignment is usually conducted using eye positions, an accurate eye localization algorithm is therefore essential for accurate face recognition. In this paper, we first study the impact of eye locations on face recognition accuracy, and then introduce an automatic technique for eye detection. The performance of our automatic eye detection technique is subsequently validated using FRGC 1.0 database. The validation shows that our eye detector has an overall 94.5% eye detection rate, with the detected eyes very close to the manually provided eye positions. In addition, the face recognition performance based on the automatic eye detection is shown to be comparable to that of using manually given eye positions.
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paper_title: Object Detection with Discriminatively Trained Part-Based Models

paper_content:

We describe an object detection system based on mixtures of multiscale deformable part models. Our system is able to represent highly variable object classes and achieves state-of-the-art results in the PASCAL object detection challenges. While deformable part models have become quite popular, their value had not been demonstrated on difficult benchmarks such as the PASCAL data sets. Our system relies on new methods for discriminative training with partially labeled data. We combine a margin-sensitive approach for data-mining hard negative examples with a formalism we call latent SVM. A latent SVM is a reformulation of MI--SVM in terms of latent variables. A latent SVM is semiconvex, and the training problem becomes convex once latent information is specified for the positive examples. This leads to an iterative training algorithm that alternates between fixing latent values for positive examples and optimizing the latent SVM objective function.
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paper_title: Learning to localize objects with structured output regression

paper_content:

Sliding window classifiers are among the most successful and widely applied techniques for object localization. However, training is typically done in a way that is not specific to the localization task. First a binary classifier is trained using a sample of positive and negative examples, and this classifier is subsequently applied to multiple regions within test images. We propose instead to treat object localization in a principled way by posing it as a problem of predicting structured data: we model the problem not as binary classification, but as the prediction of the bounding box of objects located in images. The use of a joint-kernelframework allows us to formulate the training procedure as a generalization of an SVM, which can be solved efficiently. We further improve computational efficiency by using a branch-and-bound strategy for localization during both training and testing. Experimental evaluation on the PASCAL VOC and TU Darmstadt datasets show that the structured training procedure improves performance over binary training as well as the best previously published scores.
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paper_title: PRECISE EYE AND MOUTH LOCALIZATION

paper_content:

The literature on the topic has shown a strong correlation between the degree of precision of face localization and the face recognition performance. Hence, there is a need for precise facial feature detectors, as well as objective measures for their evaluation and comparison. In this paper, we will present significant improvements to a previous method for precise eye center localization, by integrating a module for mouth localization. The technique is based on Support Vector Machines trained on optimally chosen Haar wavelet coefficients. The method has been tested on several public databases; the results are reported and compared according to a standard error measure. The tests show that the algorithm achieves high precision of localization.
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paper_title: Detector of Facial Landmarks Learned by the Structured Output SVM

paper_content:

In this paper we describe a detector of facial landmarks based on the Deformable Part Models. We treat the task of landmark detection as an instance of the structured output classification problem. We propose to learn the parameters of the detector from data by the Structured Output Support Vector Machines algorithm. In contrast to the previous works, the objective function of the learning algorithm is directly related to the performance of the resulting detector which is controlled by a user-defined loss function. The resulting detector is real-time on a standard PC, simple to implement and it can be easily modified for detection of a different set of landmarks. We evaluate performance of the proposed landmark detector on a challenging “Labeled Faces in the Wild” (LFW) database. The empirical results demonstrate that the proposed detector is consistently more accurate than two public domain implementations based on the Active Appearance Models and the Deformable Part Models. We provide an open-source implementation of the proposed detector and the manual annotation of the facial landmarks for all images in the LFW database.
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paper_title: In the Eye of the Beholder: A Survey of Models for Eyes and Gaze

paper_content:

Despite active research and significant progress in the last 30 years, eye detection and tracking remains challenging due to the individuality of eyes, occlusion, variability in scale, location, and light conditions. Data on eye location and details of eye movements have numerous applications and are essential in face detection, biometric identification, and particular human-computer interaction tasks. This paper reviews current progress and state of the art in video-based eye detection and tracking in order to identify promising techniques as well as issues to be further addressed. We present a detailed review of recent eye models and techniques for eye detection and tracking. We also survey methods for gaze estimation and compare them based on their geometric properties and reported accuracies. This review shows that, despite their apparent simplicity, the development of a general eye detection technique involves addressing many challenges, requires further theoretical developments, and is consequently of interest to many other domains problems in computer vision and beyond.
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paper_title: Pictorial Structures for Object Recognition

paper_content:

In this paper we present a computationally efficient framework for part-based modeling and recognition of objects. Our work is motivated by the pictorial structure models introduced by Fischler and Elschlager. The basic idea is to represent an object by a collection of parts arranged in a deformable configuration. The appearance of each part is modeled separately, and the deformable configuration is represented by spring-like connections between pairs of parts. These models allow for qualitative descriptions of visual appearance, and are suitable for generic recognition problems. We address the problem of using pictorial structure models to find instances of an object in an image as well as the problem of learning an object model from training examples, presenting efficient algorithms in both cases. We demonstrate the techniques by learning models that represent faces and human bodies and using the resulting models to locate the corresponding objects in novel images.
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paper_title: On detection of multiple object instances using hough transforms

paper_content:

To detect multiple objects of interest, the methods based on Hough transform use non-maxima supression or mode seeking in order to locate and to distinguish peaks in Hough images. Such postprocessing requires tuning of extra parameters and is often fragile, especially when objects of interest tend to be closely located. In the paper, we develop a new probabilistic framework that is in many ways related to Hough transform, sharing its simplicity and wide applicability. At the same time, the framework bypasses the problem of multiple peaks identification in Hough images, and permits detection of multiple objects without invoking nonmaximum suppression heuristics. As a result, the experiments demonstrate a significant improvement in detection accuracy both for the classical task of straight line detection and for a more modern category-level (pedestrian) detection problem.
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paper_title: Face detection, pose estimation, and landmark localization in the wild

paper_content:

We present a unified model for face detection, pose estimation, and landmark estimation in real-world, cluttered images. Our model is based on a mixtures of trees with a shared pool of parts; we model every facial landmark as a part and use global mixtures to capture topological changes due to viewpoint. We show that tree-structured models are surprisingly effective at capturing global elastic deformation, while being easy to optimize unlike dense graph structures. We present extensive results on standard face benchmarks, as well as a new “in the wild” annotated dataset, that suggests our system advances the state-of-the-art, sometimes considerably, for all three tasks. Though our model is modestly trained with hundreds of faces, it compares favorably to commercial systems trained with billions of examples (such as Google Picasa and face.com).
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paper_title: Max-margin additive classifiers for detection

paper_content:

We present methods for training high quality object detectors very quickly. The core contribution is a pair of fast training algorithms for piece-wise linear classifiers, which can approximate arbitrary additive models. The classifiers are trained in a max-margin framework and significantly outperform linear classifiers on a variety of vision datasets. We report experimental results quantifying training time and accuracy on image classification tasks and pedestrian detection, including detection results better than the best previous on the INRIA dataset with faster training.
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paper_title: Enhanced Local Texture Feature Sets for Face Recognition Under Difficult Lighting Conditions

paper_content:

Making recognition more reliable under uncontrolled lighting conditions is one of the most important challenges for practical face recognition systems. We tackle this by combining the strengths of robust illumination normalization, local texture-based face representations, distance transform based matching, kernel-based feature extraction and multiple feature fusion. Specifically, we make three main contributions: 1) we present a simple and efficient preprocessing chain that eliminates most of the effects of changing illumination while still preserving the essential appearance details that are needed for recognition; 2) we introduce local ternary patterns (LTP), a generalization of the local binary pattern (LBP) local texture descriptor that is more discriminant and less sensitive to noise in uniform regions, and we show that replacing comparisons based on local spatial histograms with a distance transform based similarity metric further improves the performance of LBP/LTP based face recognition; and 3) we further improve robustness by adding Kernel principal component analysis (PCA) feature extraction and incorporating rich local appearance cues from two complementary sources-Gabor wavelets and LBP-showing that the combination is considerably more accurate than either feature set alone. The resulting method provides state-of-the-art performance on three data sets that are widely used for testing recognition under difficult illumination conditions: Extended Yale-B, CAS-PEAL-R1, and Face Recognition Grand Challenge version 2 experiment 4 (FRGC-204). For example, on the challenging FRGC-204 data set it halves the error rate relative to previously published methods, achieving a face verification rate of 88.1% at 0.1% false accept rate. Further experiments show that our preprocessing method outperforms several existing preprocessors for a range of feature sets, data sets and lighting conditions.
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paper_title: Classification using intersection kernel support vector machines is efficient

paper_content:

Straightforward classification using kernelized SVMs requires evaluating the kernel for a test vector and each of the support vectors. For a class of kernels we show that one can do this much more efficiently. In particular we show that one can build histogram intersection kernel SVMs (IKSVMs) with runtime complexity of the classifier logarithmic in the number of support vectors as opposed to linear for the standard approach. We further show that by precomputing auxiliary tables we can construct an approximate classifier with constant runtime and space requirements, independent of the number of support vectors, with negligible loss in classification accuracy on various tasks. This approximation also applies to 1 - chi2 and other kernels of similar form. We also introduce novel features based on a multi-level histograms of oriented edge energy and present experiments on various detection datasets. On the INRIA pedestrian dataset an approximate IKSVM classifier based on these features has the current best performance, with a miss rate 13% lower at 10-6 False Positive Per Window than the linear SVM detector of Dalal & Triggs. On the Daimler Chrysler pedestrian dataset IKSVM gives comparable accuracy to the best results (based on quadratic SVM), while being 15times faster. In these experiments our approximate IKSVM is up to 2000times faster than a standard implementation and requires 200times less memory. Finally we show that a 50times speedup is possible using approximate IKSVM based on spatial pyramid features on the Caltech 101 dataset with negligible loss of accuracy.
---
paper_title: Attribute and simile classifiers for face verification

paper_content:

We present two novel methods for face verification. Our first method - “attribute” classifiers - uses binary classifiers trained to recognize the presence or absence of describable aspects of visual appearance (e.g., gender, race, and age). Our second method - “simile” classifiers - removes the manual labeling required for attribute classification and instead learns the similarity of faces, or regions of faces, to specific reference people. Neither method requires costly, often brittle, alignment between image pairs; yet, both methods produce compact visual descriptions, and work on real-world images. Furthermore, both the attribute and simile classifiers improve on the current state-of-the-art for the LFW data set, reducing the error rates compared to the current best by 23.92% and 26.34%, respectively, and 31.68% when combined. For further testing across pose, illumination, and expression, we introduce a new data set - termed PubFig - of real-world images of public figures (celebrities and politicians) acquired from the internet. This data set is both larger (60,000 images) and deeper (300 images per individual) than existing data sets of its kind. Finally, we present an evaluation of human performance.
---
paper_title: FaceTracer: A Search Engine for Large Collections of Images with Faces

paper_content:

We have created the first image search engine based entirely on faces. Using simple text queries such as "smiling men with blond hair and mustaches," users can search through over 3.1 million faces which have been automatically labeled on the basis of several facial attributes. Faces in our database have been extracted and aligned from images downloaded from the internet using a commercial face detector, and the number of images and attributes continues to grow daily. Our classification approach uses a novel combination of Support Vector Machines and Adaboost which exploits the strong structure of faces to select and train on the optimal set of features for each attribute. We show state-of-the-art classification results compared to previous works, and demonstrate the power of our architecture through a functional, large-scale face search engine. Our framework is fully automatic, easy to scale, and computes all labels off-line, leading to fast on-line search performance. In addition, we describe how our system can be used for a number of applications, including law enforcement, social networks, and personal photo management. Our search engine will soon be made publicly available.
---
paper_title: The IMM Face Database, An Annotated Dataset of 240 Face Images

paper_content:

A machine for screwing down the spoke nuts of a bicycle wheel while controlling the torque applied to each nut in response to the position of the nut on the wheel in relation to the order of tightening of the nuts. The torque applied is progressively greater from nut to nut starting from the first until a maximum torque is applied after the spokes over half the wheel circumference have been tightened.
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Title: A literature survey on robust and efficient eye localization in real-life scenarios

Section 1: Introduction
Description 1: Write about the importance of eye localization, challenges faced in real-life scenarios, and the main contributions of the survey.

Section 2: Localizing eyes in a single face
Description 2: Review existing techniques for eye localization categorized based on the information or patterns used for model building. Include subcategories and methodologies within each category.

Section 3: Measuring eye characteristics
Description 3: Discuss methods that exploit inherent features of eyes such as shape and intensity contrast, and mention their limitations under uncontrolled conditions.

Section 4: Learning statistical appearance model
Description 4: Cover statistical models using photometric appearance features, detailing appearance feature extraction, representation, and various statistical modeling techniques.

Section 5: Towards the development of a robust eye localization system
Description 5: Present a global system architecture for eye localization, including preprocessing methods, accuracy and efficiency tradeoffs, and postprocessing methods.

Section 6: Performance evaluation
Description 6: Explain different metrics used to evaluate eye localization performance and the major face databases used for benchmark evaluations.

Section 7: Conclusion and prospect
Description 7: Summarize key findings, the current state of research, and suggest promising future research directions and challenges remaining to be addressed.