Yi Li

Bio: Yi Li is an academic researcher from Chinese Academy of Sciences. The author has contributed to research in topics: Image translation & Face hallucination. The author has an hindex of 10, co-authored 30 publications receiving 246 citations. Previous affiliations of Yi Li include Center for Excellence in Education & Dalian University of Technology.

A Survey of Deep Facial Attribute Analysis

Abstract: Facial attribute analysis has received considerable attention when deep learning techniques made remarkable breakthroughs in this field over the past few years. Deep learning based facial attribute analysis consists of two basic sub-issues: facial attribute estimation (FAE), which recognizes whether facial attributes are present in given images, and facial attribute manipulation (FAM), which synthesizes or removes desired facial attributes. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of deep facial attribute analysis from the perspectives of both estimation and manipulation. First, we summarize a general pipeline that deep facial attribute analysis follows, which comprises two stages: data preprocessing and model construction. Additionally, we introduce the underlying theories of this two-stage pipeline for both FAE and FAM. Second, the datasets and performance metrics commonly used in facial attribute analysis are presented. Third, we create a taxonomy of state-of-the-art methods and review deep FAE and FAM algorithms in detail. Furthermore, several additional facial attribute related issues are introduced, as well as relevant real-world applications. Finally, we discuss possible challenges and promising future research directions.

Arbitrary Talking Face Generation via Attentional Audio-Visual Coherence Learning

Abstract: Talking face generation aims to synthesize a face video with precise lip synchronization as well as a smooth transition of facial motion over the entire video via the given speech clip and facial image. Most existing methods mainly focus on either disentangling the information in a single image or learning temporal information between frames. However, cross-modality coherence between audio and video information has not been well addressed during synthesis. In this paper, we propose a novel arbitrary talking face generation framework by discovering the audio-visual coherence via the proposed Asymmetric Mutual Information Estimator (AMIE). In addition, we propose a Dynamic Attention (DA) block by selectively focusing the lip area of the input image during the training stage, to further enhance lip synchronization. Experimental results on benchmark LRW dataset and GRID dataset transcend the state-of-the-art methods on prevalent metrics with robust high-resolution synthesizing on gender and pose variations.

Cross-Spectral Face Hallucination via Disentangling Independent Factors

Abstract: The cross-sensor gap is one of the challenges that have aroused much research interests in Heterogeneous Face Recognition (HFR). Although recent methods have attempted to fill the gap with deep generative networks, most of them suffer from the inevitable misalignment between different face modalities. Instead of imaging sensors, the misalignment primarily results from facial geometric variations that are independent of the spectrum. Rather than building a monolithic but complex structure, this paper proposes a Pose Aligned Cross-spectral Hallucination (PACH) approach to disentangle the independent factors and deal with them in individual stages. In the first stage, an Unsupervised Face Alignment (UFA) module is designed to align the facial shapes of the near-infrared (NIR) images with those of the visible (VIS) images in a generative way, where UV maps are effectively utilized as the shape guidance. Thus the task of the second stage becomes spectrum translation with aligned paired data. We develop a Texture Prior Synthesis (TPS) module to achieve complexion control and consequently generate more realistic VIS images than existing methods. Experiments on three challenging NIR-VIS datasets verify the effectiveness of our approach in producing visually appealing images and achieving state-of-the-art performance in HFR.

Pose-preserving Cross Spectral Face Hallucination

Abstract: To narrow the inherent sensing gap in heterogeneous face recognition (HFR), recent methods have resorted to generative models and explored the ?recognition via generation? framework. Even though, it remains a very challenging task to synthesize photo-realistic visible faces (VIS) from near-infrared (NIR) images especially when paired training data are unavailable. We present an approach to avert the data misalignment problem and faithfully preserve pose, expression and identity information during cross-spectral face hallucination. At the pixel level, we introduce an unsupervised attention mechanism to warping that is jointly learned with the generator to derive pixel-wise correspondence from unaligned data. At the image level, an auxiliary generator is employed to facilitate the learning of mapping from NIR to VIS domain. At the domain level, we first apply the mutual information constraint to explicitly measure the correlation between domains and thus benefit synthesis. Extensive experiments on three heterogeneous face datasets demonstrate that our approach not only outperforms current state-of-the-art HFR methods but also produce visually appealing results at a high resolution.

Anti-Makeup: Learning A Bi-Level Adversarial Network for Makeup-Invariant Face Verification

Abstract: Makeup is widely used to improve facial attractiveness and is well accepted by the public. However, different makeup styles will result in significant facial appearance changes. It remains a challenging problem to match makeup and non-makeup face images. This paper proposes a learning from generation approach for makeup-invariant face verification by introducing a bi-level adversarial network (BLAN). To alleviate the negative effects from makeup, we first generate non-makeup images from makeup ones, and then use the synthesized non-makeup images for further verification. Two adversarial networks in BLAN are integrated in an end-to-end deep network, with the one on pixel level for reconstructing appealing facial images and the other on feature level for preserving identity information. These two networks jointly reduce the sensing gap between makeup and non-makeup images. Moreover, we make the generator well constrained by incorporating multiple perceptual losses. Experimental results on three benchmark makeup face datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art verification accuracy across makeup status and can produce photo-realistic non-makeup face images.

A Review on Generative Adversarial Networks: Algorithms, Theory, and Applications

Abstract: Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are a hot research topic recently. GANs have been widely studied since 2014, and a large number of algorithms have been proposed. However, there is few comprehensive study explaining the connections among different GANs variants, and how they have evolved. In this paper, we attempt to provide a review on various GANs methods from the perspectives of algorithms, theory, and applications. Firstly, the motivations, mathematical representations, and structure of most GANs algorithms are introduced in details. Furthermore, GANs have been combined with other machine learning algorithms for specific applications, such as semi-supervised learning, transfer learning, and reinforcement learning. This paper compares the commonalities and differences of these GANs methods. Secondly, theoretical issues related to GANs are investigated. Thirdly, typical applications of GANs in image processing and computer vision, natural language processing, music, speech and audio, medical field, and data science are illustrated. Finally, the future open research problems for GANs are pointed out.