Most face databases have been created under controlled conditions to facilitate the study of specific parameters on the face recognition problem. These parameters include such variables as position, pose, lighting, background, camera quality, and gender. While there are many applications for face recognition technology in which one can control the parameters of image acquisition, there are also many applications in which the practitioner has little or no control over such parameters. This database, Labeled Faces in the Wild, is provided as an aid in studying the latter, unconstrained, recognition problem. The database contains labeled face photographs spanning the range of conditions typically encountered in everyday life. The database exhibits “natural” variability in factors such as pose, lighting, race, accessories, occlusions, and background. In addition to describing the details of the database, we provide specific experimental paradigms for which the database is suitable. This is done in an effort to make research performed with the database as consistent and comparable as possible. We provide baseline results, including results of a state of the art face recognition system combined with a face alignment system. To facilitate experimentation on the database, we provide several parallel databases, including an aligned version.

/pdf/labeled-faces-in-the-wild-a-database-forstudying-face-2prti1m53k.pdf

Labeled Faces in the Wild: A Database forStudying Face Recognition in Unconstrained Environments

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.

/pdf/enhanced-local-texture-feature-sets-for-face-recognition-4ixve2vsid.pdf

Enhanced Local Texture Feature Sets for Face Recognition Under Difficult Lighting Conditions

The capacity to estimate the head pose of another person is a common human ability that presents a unique challenge for computer vision systems. Compared to face detection and recognition, which have been the primary foci of face-related vision research, identity-invariant head pose estimation has fewer rigorously evaluated systems or generic solutions. In this paper, we discuss the inherent difficulties in head pose estimation and present an organized survey describing the evolution of the field. Our discussion focuses on the advantages and disadvantages of each approach and spans 90 of the most innovative and characteristic papers that have been published on this topic. We compare these systems by focusing on their ability to estimate coarse and fine head pose, highlighting approaches that are well suited for unconstrained environments.

Head Pose Estimation in Computer Vision: A Survey

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.

Annotated Facial Landmarks in the Wild: A large-scale, real-world database for facial landmark localization

This paper proposes a novel high-order local pattern descriptor, local derivative pattern (LDP), for face recognition. LDP is a general framework to encode directional pattern features based on local derivative variations. The nth-order LDP is proposed to encode the (n-1)th -order local derivative direction variations, which can capture more detailed information than the first-order local pattern used in local binary pattern (LBP). Different from LBP encoding the relationship between the central point and its neighbors, the LDP templates extract high-order local information by encoding various distinctive spatial relationships contained in a given local region. Both gray-level images and Gabor feature images are used to evaluate the comparative performances of LDP and LBP. Extensive experimental results on FERET, CAS-PEAL, CMU-PIE, Extended Yale B, and FRGC databases show that the high-order LDP consistently performs much better than LBP for both face identification and face verification under various conditions.

/pdf/local-derivative-pattern-versus-local-binary-pattern-face-1r6nu3turc.pdf

Local Derivative Pattern Versus Local Binary Pattern: Face Recognition With High-Order Local Pattern Descriptor

In this paper, we describe the acquisition and contents of a large-scale Chinese face database: the CAS-PEAL face database. The goals of creating the CAS-PEAL face database include the following: 1) providing the worldwide researchers of face recognition with different sources of variations, particularly pose, expression, accessories, and lighting (PEAL), and exhaustive ground-truth information in one uniform database; 2) advancing the state-of-the-art face recognition technologies aiming at practical applications by using off-the-shelf imaging equipment and by designing normal face variations in the database; and 3) providing a large-scale face database of Mongolian. Currently, the CAS-PEAL face database contains 99 594 images of 1040 individuals (595 males and 445 females). A total of nine cameras are mounted horizontally on an arc arm to simultaneously capture images across different poses. Each subject is asked to look straight ahead, up, and down to obtain 27 images in three shots. Five facial expressions, six accessories, and 15 lighting changes are also included in the database. A selected subset of the database (CAS-PEAL-R1, containing 30 863 images of the 1040 subjects) is available to other researchers now. We discuss the evaluation protocol based on the CAS-PEAL-R1 database and present the performance of four algorithms as a baseline to do the following: 1) elementarily assess the difficulty of the database for face recognition algorithms; 2) preference evaluation results for researchers using the database; and 3) identify the strengths and weaknesses of the commonly used algorithms.

http://www.jdl.ac.cn/doc/2008/IEEE_SMC_A_gao_CAS-PEAL_Fianl.pdf

The CAS-PEAL Large-Scale Chinese Face Database and Baseline Evaluations

The ICT-ISVISION Joint Research & Development Laboratory (JDL) for Face Recognition has constructed the CAS-PEAL face database supported by the National Hi-Tech Program and ISVISION Technologies Co., Ltd. The goals to create the PEAL face database include (1) providing the worldwide researchers of FR community a large-scale face database for training and evaluating their algorithms; (2) facilitating the development of FR by providing large-scale face images with different sources of variations, especially Pose, Expression, Accessories, and Lighting (PEAL); (3) advancing the state-of-the-art face recognition technologies aiming at practical applications especially for the oriental. Currently, the CAS-PEAL face database contains 99,594 images of 1040 individuals (595 males and 445 females) with varying Pose, Expression, Accessory, and Lighting (PEAL). For each subject, 9 cameras spaced equally in a horizontal semicircular shelf are setup to simultaneously capture images across different poses in one shot. Each subject is also asked to look up and down to capture 18 images in another two shots. We also considered 5 kinds of expressions, 6 kinds accessories (3 glasses, and 3 caps), and 15 lighting directions. This face database is now partly made available (a subset named by CAS-PEAL-R1, contain 30,900 images of 1040 subjects) for research purpose only on a case-by-case basis only. JDL is serving as the technical agent for distribution of the database and reserves the copyright of all the images in the database.

Delong Zhou

Papers

The CAS-PEAL Large-Scale Chinese Face Database and Baseline Evaluations

CAS-PEAL Large-Scale Chinese Face Database and Evaluation Protocols