da Vitoria Lobo

Bio: da Vitoria Lobo is an academic researcher from University of Central Florida. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 372 citations.

Age classification from facial images

Abstract: The ability to classify age from a facial image has not been pursued in computer vision. This research addresses the limited task of age classification of a facial image into a baby, young adult, and senior adult. This is the first reported work to classify age, and to successfully extract and use natural wrinkles. We present a theory and practical computations for visual age classification from facial images, based on cranio-facial changes in feature-position ratios, and on skin wrinkle analysis. Three age groups are classified. >

Recognizing action units for facial expression analysis

Abstract: Most automatic expression analysis systems attempt to recognize a small set of prototypic expressions, such as happiness, anger, surprise, and fear. Such prototypic expressions, however, occur rather infrequently. Human emotions and intentions are more often communicated by changes in one or a few discrete facial features. In this paper, we develop an automatic face analysis (AFA) system to analyze facial expressions based on both permanent facial features (brows, eyes, mouth) and transient facial features (deepening of facial furrows) in a nearly frontal-view face image sequence. The AFA system recognizes fine-grained changes in facial expression into action units (AU) of the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), instead of a few prototypic expressions. Multistate face and facial component models are proposed for tracking and modeling the various facial features, including lips, eyes, brows, cheeks, and furrows. During tracking, detailed parametric descriptions of the facial features are extracted. With these parameters as the inputs, a group of action units (neutral expression, six upper face AU and 10 lower face AU) are recognized whether they occur alone or in combinations. The system has achieved average recognition rates of 96.4 percent (95.4 percent if neutral expressions are excluded) for upper face AU and 96.7 percent (95.6 percent with neutral expressions excluded) for lower face AU. The generalizability of the system has been tested by using independent image databases collected and FACS-coded for ground-truth by different research teams.

Age and gender classification using convolutional neural networks

Abstract: Automatic age and gender classification has become relevant to an increasing amount of applications, particularly since the rise of social platforms and social media. Nevertheless, performance of existing methods on real-world images is still significantly lacking, especially when compared to the tremendous leaps in performance recently reported for the related task of face recognition. In this paper we show that by learning representations through the use of deep-convolutional neural networks (CNN), a significant increase in performance can be obtained on these tasks. To this end, we propose a simple convolutional net architecture that can be used even when the amount of learning data is limited. We evaluate our method on the recent Adience benchmark for age and gender estimation and show it to dramatically outperform current state-of-the-art methods.

Deep Expectation of Real and Apparent Age from a Single Image Without Facial Landmarks

Abstract: In this paper we propose a deep learning solution to age estimation from a single face image without the use of facial landmarks and introduce the IMDB-WIKI dataset, the largest public dataset of face images with age and gender labels. If the real age estimation research spans over decades, the study of apparent age estimation or the age as perceived by other humans from a face image is a recent endeavor. We tackle both tasks with our convolutional neural networks (CNNs) of VGG-16 architecture which are pre-trained on ImageNet for image classification. We pose the age estimation problem as a deep classification problem followed by a softmax expected value refinement. The key factors of our solution are: deep learned models from large data, robust face alignment, and expected value formulation for age regression. We validate our methods on standard benchmarks and achieve state-of-the-art results for both real and apparent age estimation.

Age Synthesis and Estimation via Faces: A Survey

Abstract: Human age, as an important personal trait, can be directly inferred by distinct patterns emerging from the facial appearance. Derived from rapid advances in computer graphics and machine vision, computer-based age synthesis and estimation via faces have become particularly prevalent topics recently because of their explosively emerging real-world applications, such as forensic art, electronic customer relationship management, security control and surveillance monitoring, biometrics, entertainment, and cosmetology. Age synthesis is defined to rerender a face image aesthetically with natural aging and rejuvenating effects on the individual face. Age estimation is defined to label a face image automatically with the exact age (year) or the age group (year range) of the individual face. Because of their particularity and complexity, both problems are attractive yet challenging to computer-based application system designers. Large efforts from both academia and industry have been devoted in the last a few decades. In this paper, we survey the complete state-of-the-art techniques in the face image-based age synthesis and estimation topics. Existing models, popular algorithms, system performances, technical difficulties, popular face aging databases, evaluation protocols, and promising future directions are also provided with systematic discussions.

Age and Gender Estimation of Unfiltered Faces

Abstract: This paper concerns the estimation of facial attributes—namely, age and gender—from images of faces acquired in challenging, in the wild conditions This problem has received far less attention than the related problem of face recognition, and in particular, has not enjoyed the same dramatic improvement in capabilities demonstrated by contemporary face recognition systems Here, we address this problem by making the following contributions First, in answer to one of the key problems of age estimation research—absence of data—we offer a unique data set of face images, labeled for age and gender, acquired by smart-phones and other mobile devices, and uploaded without manual filtering to online image repositories We show the images in our collection to be more challenging than those offered by other face-photo benchmarks Second, we describe the dropout-support vector machine approach used by our system for face attribute estimation, in order to avoid over-fitting This method, inspired by the dropout learning techniques now popular with deep belief networks, is applied here for training support vector machines, to the best of our knowledge, for the first time Finally, we present a robust face alignment technique, which explicitly considers the uncertainties of facial feature detectors We report extensive tests analyzing both the difficulty levels of contemporary benchmarks as well as the capabilities of our own system These show our method to outperform state-of-the-art by a wide margin