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Register a new userJoint Face Image Restoration and Frontalization for Recognition
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Added by
Xiaoguang Tu
Publication date
2021
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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In real-world scenarios, many factors may harm face recognition performance, e.g., large pose, bad illumination,low resolution, blur and noise. To address these challenges, previous efforts usually first restore the low-quality faces to high-quality ones and then perform face recognition. However, most of these methods are stage-wise, which is sub-optimal and deviates from the reality. In this paper, we address all these challenges jointly for unconstrained face recognition. We propose an Multi-Degradation Face Restoration (MDFR) model to restore frontalized high-quality faces from the given low-quality ones under arbitrary facial poses, with three distinct novelties. First, MDFR is a well-designed encoder-decoder architecture which extracts feature representation from an input face image with arbitrary low-quality factors and restores it to a high-quality counterpart. Second, MDFR introduces a pose residual learning strategy along with a 3D-based Pose Normalization Module (PNM), which can perceive the pose gap between the input initial pose and its real-frontal pose to guide the face frontalization. Finally, MDFR can generate frontalized high-quality face images by a single unified network, showing a strong capability of preserving face identity. Qualitative and quantitative experiments on both controlled and in-the-wild benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of MDFR over state-of-the-art methods on both face frontalization and face restoration.
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Recent advances in deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) have shown impressive performance improvements on thermal to visible face synthesis and matching problems. However, current DCNN-based synthesis models do not perform well on thermal faces with large pose variations. In order to deal with this problem, heterogeneous face frontalization methods are needed in which a model takes a thermal profile face image and generates a frontal visible face. This is an extremely difficult problem due to the large domain as well as large pose discrepancies between the two modalities. Despite its applications in biometrics and surveillance, this problem is relatively unexplored in the literature. We propose a domain agnostic learning-based generative adversarial network (DAL-GAN) which can synthesize frontal views in the visible domain from thermal faces with pose variations. DAL-GAN consists of a generator with an auxiliary classifier and two discriminators which capture both local and global texture discriminations for better synthesis. A contrastive constraint is enforced in the latent space of the generator with the help of a dual-path training strategy, which improves the feature vector discrimination. Finally, a multi-purpose loss function is utilized to guide the network in synthesizing identity preserving cross-domain frontalization. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that DAL-GAN can generate better quality frontal views compared to the other baseline methods.
Face recognition has made significant progress in recent years due to deep convolutional neural networks (CNN). In many face recognition (FR) scenarios, face images are acquired from a sequence with huge intra-variations. These intra-variations, which are mainly affected by the low-quality face images, cause instability of recognition performance. Previous works have focused on ad-hoc methods to select frames from a video or use face image quality assessment (FIQA) methods, which consider only a particular or combination of several distortions. In this work, we present an efficient non-reference image quality assessment for FR that directly links image quality assessment (IQA) and FR. More specifically, we propose a new measurement to evaluate image quality without any reference. Based on the proposed quality measurement, we propose a deep Tiny Face Quality network (tinyFQnet) to learn a quality prediction function from data. We evaluate the proposed method for different powerful FR models on two classical video-based (or template-based) benchmark: IJB-B and YTF. Extensive experiments show that, although the tinyFQnet is much smaller than the others, the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art quality assessment methods in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.
Current state-of-the-art visual recognition systems usually rely on the following pipeline: (a) pretraining a neural network on a large-scale dataset (e.g., ImageNet) and (b) finetuning the network weights on a smaller, task-specific dataset. Such a pipeline assumes the sole weight adaptation is able to transfer the network capability from one domain to another domain, based on a strong assumption that a fixed architecture is appropriate for all domains. However, each domain with a distinct recognition target may need different levels/paths of feature hierarchy, where some neurons may become redundant, and some others are re-activated to form new network structures. In this work, we prove that dynamically adapting network architectures tailored for each domain task along with weight finetuning benefits in both efficiency and effectiveness, compared to the existing image recognition pipeline that only tunes the weights regardless of the architecture. Our method can be easily generalized to an unsupervised paradigm by replacing supernet training with self-supervised learning in the source domain tasks and performing linear evaluation in the downstream tasks. This further improves the search efficiency of our method. Moreover, we also provide principled and empirical analysis to explain why our approach works by investigating the ineffectiveness of existing neural architecture search. We find that preserving the joint distribution of the network architecture and weights is of importance. This analysis not only benefits image recognition but also provides insights for crafting neural networks. Experiments on five representative image recognition tasks such as person re-identification, age estimation, gender recognition, image classification, and unsupervised domain adaptation demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Despite recent advances in deep learning-based face frontalization methods, photo-realistic and illumination preserving frontal face synthesis is still challenging due to large pose and illumination discrepancy during training. We propose a novel Flow-based Feature Warping Model (FFWM) which can learn to synthesize photo-realistic and illumination preserving frontal images with illumination inconsistent supervision. Specifically, an Illumination Preserving Module (IPM) is proposed to learn illumination preserving image synthesis from illumination inconsistent image pairs. IPM includes two pathways which collaborate to ensure the synthesized frontal images are illumination preserving and with fine details. Moreover, a Warp Attention Module (WAM) is introduced to reduce the pose discrepancy in the feature level, and hence to synthesize frontal images more effectively and preserve more details of profile images. The attention mechanism in WAM helps reduce the artifacts caused by the displacements between the profile and the frontal images. Quantitative and qualitative experimental results show that our FFWM can synthesize photo-realistic and illumination preserving frontal images and performs favorably against the state-of-the-art results.
This paper studies the problem of blind face restoration from an unconstrained blurry, noisy, low-resolution, or compressed image (i.e., degraded observation). For better recovery of fine facial details, we modify the problem setting by taking both the degraded observation and a high-quality guided image of the same identity as input to our guided face restoration network (GFRNet). However, the degraded observation and guided image generally are different in pose, illumination and expression, thereby making plain CNNs (e.g., U-Net) fail to recover fine and identity-aware facial details. To tackle this issue, our GFRNet model includes both a warping subnetwork (WarpNet) and a reconstruction subnetwork (RecNet). The WarpNet is introduced to predict flow field for warping the guided image to correct pose and expression (i.e., warped guidance), while the RecNet takes the degraded observation and warped guidance as input to produce the restoration result. Due to that the ground-truth flow field is unavailable, landmark loss together with total variation regularization are incorporated to guide the learning of WarpNet. Furthermore, to make the model applicable to blind restoration, our GFRNet is trained on the synthetic data with versatile settings on blur kernel, noise level, downsampling scale factor, and JPEG quality factor. Experiments show that our GFRNet not only performs favorably against the state-of-the-art image and face restoration methods, but also generates visually photo-realistic results on real degraded facial images.
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