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Although widely used, Multilinear PCA (MPCA), one of the leading multilinear analysis methods, still suffers from four major drawbacks. First, it is very sensitive to outliers and noise. Second, it is unable to cope with missing values. Third, it is computationally expensive since MPCA deals with large multi-dimensional datasets. Finally, it is unable to maintain the local geometrical structures due to the averaging process. This paper proposes a novel approach named Compressed Submanifold Multifactor Analysis (CSMA) to solve the four problems mentioned above. Our approach can deal with the problem of missing values and outliers via SVD-L1. The Random Projection method is used to obtain the fast low-rank approximation of a given multifactor dataset. In addition, it is able to preserve the geometry of the original data. Our CSMA method can be used efficiently for multiple purposes, e.g. noise and outlier removal, estimation of missing values, biometric applications. We show that CSMA method can achieve good results and is very efficient in the inpainting problem as compared to [1], [2]. Our method also achieves higher face recognition rates compared to LRTC, SPMA, MPCA and some other methods, i.e. PCA, LDA and LPP, on three challenging face databases, i.e. CMU-MPIE, CMU-PIE and Extended YALE-B.

We propose a facial alignment algorithm that is able to jointly deal with the presence of facial pose variation, partial occlusion of the face, and varying illumination and expressions. Our approach proceeds from sparse to dense landmarking steps using a set of specific models trained to best account for the shape and texture variation manifested by facial landmarks and facial shapes across pose and various expressions. We also propose the use of a novel l1-regularized least squares approach that we incorporate into our shape model, which is an improvement over the shape model used by several prior Active Shape Model (ASM) based facial landmark localization algorithms. Our approach is compared against several state-of-the-art methods on many challenging test datasets and exhibits a higher fitting accuracy on all of them.

Automatic face recognition performance has been steadily improving over years of research, however it remains significantly affected by a number of factors such as illumination, pose, expression, resolution and other factors that can impact matching scores. The focus of this paper is the pose problem which remains largely overlooked in most real-world applications. Specifically, we focus on one-to-one matching scenarios where a query face image of a random pose is matched against a set of gallery images. We propose a method that relies on two fundamental components: (a) A 3D modeling step to geometrically correct the viewpoint of the face. For this purpose, we extend a recent technique for efficient synthesis of 3D face models called 3D Generic Elastic Model. (b) A sparse feature extraction step using subspace modeling and ℓ1-minimization to induce pose-tolerance in coefficient space. This in return enables the synthesis of an equivalent frontal-looking face, which can be used towards recognition. We show significant performance improvements in verification rates compared to commercial matchers, and also demonstrate the resilience of the proposed method with respect to degrading input quality. We find that the proposed technique is able to match non-frontal images to other non-frontal images of varying angles.

Iris masks play an important role in iris recognition. They indicate which part of the iris texture map is useful and which part is occluded or contaminated by noisy image artifacts such as eyelashes, eyelids, eyeglasses frames, and specular reflections. The accuracy of the iris mask is extremely important. The performance of the iris recognition system will decrease dramatically when the iris mask is inaccurate, even when the best recognition algorithm is used. Traditionally, people used the rule-based algorithms to estimate iris masks from iris images. However, the accuracy of the iris masks generated this way is questionable. In this work, we propose to use Figueiredo and Jain's Gaussian Mixture Models (FJ-GMMs) to model the underlying probabilistic distributions of both valid and invalid regions on iris images. We also explored possible features and found that Gabor Filter Bank (GFB) provides the most discriminative information for our goal. Finally, we applied Simulated Annealing (SA) technique to optimize the parameters of GFB in order to achieve the best recognition rate. Experimental results show that the masks generated by the proposed algorithm increase the iris recognition rate on both ICE2 and UBIRIS dataset, verifying the effectiveness and importance of our proposed method for iris occlusion estimation.

In this paper, we propose a novel method for generating a realistic 3D human face from a single 2D face image for the purpose of synthesizing new 2D face images at arbitrary poses using gender and ethnicity specific models. We employ the Generic Elastic Model (GEM) approach, which elastically deforms a generic 3D depth-map based on the sparse observations of an input face image in order to estimate the depth of the face image. Particularly, we show that Gender and Ethnicity specific GEMs (GE-GEMs) can approximate the 3D shape of the input face image more accurately, achieving a better generalization of 3D face modeling and reconstruction compared to the original GEM approach. We qualitatively validate our method using publicly available databases by showing each reconstructed 3D shape generated from a single image and new synthesized poses of the same person at arbitrary angles. For quantitative comparisons, we compare our synthesized results against 3D scanned data and also perform face recognition using synthesized images generated from a single enrollment frontal image. We obtain promising results for handling pose and expression changes based on the proposed method.

Classical face recognition techniques have been successful at operating under well-controlled conditions; however, they have difficulty in robustly performing recognition in uncontrolled real-world scenarios where variations in pose, illumination, and expression are encountered. In this paper, we propose a new method for real-world unconstrained pose-invariant face recognition. We first construct a 3D model for each subject in our database using only a single 2D image by applying the 3D Generic Elastic Model (3D GEM) approach. These 3D models comprise an intermediate gallery database from which novel 2D pose views are synthesized for matching. Before matching, an initial estimate of the pose of the test query is obtained using a linear regression approach based on automatic facial landmark annotation. Each 3D model is subsequently rendered at different poses within a limited search space about the estimated pose, and the resulting images are matched against the test query. Finally, we compute the distances between the synthesized images and test query by using a simple normalized correlation matcher to show the effectiveness of our pose synthesis method to real-world data. We present convincing results on challenging data sets and video sequences demonstrating high recognition accuracy under controlled as well as unseen, uncontrolled real-world scenarios using a fast implementation.

As biometric authentication systems become more prevalent, it is becoming increasingly important to evaluate their performance. This paper introduces a novel statistical method of performance evaluation for these systems. Given a database of authentication results from an existing system, the method uses a hierarchical random effects model, along with Bayesian inference techniques yielding posterior predictive distributions, to predict performance in terms of error rates using various explanatory variables. By incorporating explanatory variables as well as random effects, the method allows for prediction of error rates when the authentication system is applied to potentially larger and/or different groups of subjects than those originally documented in the database. We also extend the model to allow for prediction of the probability of a false alarm on a "watch-list" as a function of the list size. We consider application of our methodology to three different face authentication systems: a filter-based system, a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM)-based system, and a system based on frequency domain representation of facial asymmetry.

We describe a general probabilistic framework for matching patterns that experience in-plane nonlinear deformations, such as iris patterns. Given a pair of images, we derive a maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) estimate of the parameters of the relative deformation between them. Our estimation process accomplishes two things simultaneously: It normalizes for pattern warping and it returns a distortion-tolerant similarity metric which can be used for matching two nonlinearly deformed image patterns. The prior probability of the deformation parameters is specific to the pattern-type and, therefore, should result in more accurate matching than an arbitrary general distribution. We show that the proposed method is very well suited for handling iris biometrics, applying it to two databases of iris images which contain real instances of warped patterns. We demonstrate a significant improvement in matching accuracy using the proposed deformed Bayesian matching methodology. We also show that the additional computation required to estimate the deformation is relatively inexpensive, making it suitable for real-time applications.