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Current data-driven methodologies for point cloud matching demand extensive training time and computational resources, presenting significant challenges for model deployment and application. In the point cloud matching task, recent advancements with an encoder-only Transformer architecture have revealed the emergence of semantically meaningful patterns in the attention heads, particularly resembling Gaussian functions centered on each point of the input shape. In this work, we further investigate this phenomenon by integrating these patterns as fixed attention weights within the attention heads of the Transformer architecture. We evaluate two variants: one utilizing predetermined variance values for the Gaussians, and another where the variance values are treated as learnable parameters. Additionally we analyze the performances on noisy data and explore a possible way to improve robustness to noise. Our findings demonstrate that fixing the attention weights not only accelerates the training process but also enhances the stability of the optimization. Furthermore, we conducted an ablation study to identify the specific layers where the infused information is most impactful and to understand the reliance of the network on this information.

For the last decade, there has been a push to use multi-dimensional (latent) spaces to represent concepts; and yet how to manipulate these concepts or reason with them remains largely unclear. Some recent methods exploit multiple latent representations and their connection, making this research question even more entangled. Our goal is to understand how operations in the latent space affect the underlying concepts. To that end, we explore the task of concept blending through diffusion models. Diffusion models are based on a connection between a latent representation of textual prompts and a latent space that enables image reconstruction and generation. This task allows us to try different text-based combination strategies, and evaluate easily through a visual analysis. Our conclusion is that concept blending through space manipulation is possible, although the best strategy depends on the context of the blend.

In this work, we present the local patch mesh representation for neural signed distance fields. This technique allows to discretize local regions of the level sets of an input SDF by projecting and deforming flat patch meshes onto the level set surface, using exclusively the SDF information and its gradient. Our analysis reveals this method to be more accurate than the standard marching cubes algorithm for approximating the implicit surface. Then, we apply this representation in the setting of handle-guided deformation: we introduce two distinct pipelines, which make use of 3D neural fields to compute As-Rigid-As-Possible deformations of both high-resolution meshes and neural fields under a given set of constraints. We run a comprehensive evaluation of our method and various baselines for neural field and mesh deformation which show both pipelines achieve impressive efficiency and notable improvements in terms of quality of results and robustness. With our novel pipeline, we introduce a scalable approach to solve a well-established geometry processing problem on high-resolution meshes, and pave the way for extending other geometric tasks to the domain of implicit surfaces via local patch meshing., Comment: 12 pages, 16 figures

Synthetic data is gaining increasing relevance for training machine learning models. This is mainly motivated due to several factors such as the lack of real data and intra-class variability, time and errors produced in manual labeling, and in some cases privacy concerns, among others. This paper presents an overview of the 2nd edition of the Face Recognition Challenge in the Era of Synthetic Data (FRCSyn) organized at CVPR 2024. FRCSyn aims to investigate the use of synthetic data in face recognition to address current technological limitations, including data privacy concerns, demographic biases, generalization to novel scenarios, and performance constraints in challenging situations such as aging, pose variations, and occlusions. Unlike the 1st edition, in which synthetic data from DCFace and GANDiffFace methods was only allowed to train face recognition systems, in this 2nd edition we propose new sub-tasks that allow participants to explore novel face generative methods. The outcomes of the 2nd FRCSyn Challenge, along with the proposed experimental protocol and benchmarking contribute significantly to the application of synthetic data to face recognition., Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2311.10476

Large-scale face recognition datasets are collected by crawling the Internet and without individuals' consent, raising legal, ethical, and privacy concerns. With the recent advances in generative models, recently several works proposed generating synthetic face recognition datasets to mitigate concerns in web-crawled face recognition datasets. This paper presents the summary of the Synthetic Data for Face Recognition (SDFR) Competition held in conjunction with the 18th IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG 2024) and established to investigate the use of synthetic data for training face recognition models. The SDFR competition was split into two tasks, allowing participants to train face recognition systems using new synthetic datasets and/or existing ones. In the first task, the face recognition backbone was fixed and the dataset size was limited, while the second task provided almost complete freedom on the model backbone, the dataset, and the training pipeline. The submitted models were trained on existing and also new synthetic datasets and used clever methods to improve training with synthetic data. The submissions were evaluated and ranked on a diverse set of seven benchmarking datasets. The paper gives an overview of the submitted face recognition models and reports achieved performance compared to baseline models trained on real and synthetic datasets. Furthermore, the evaluation of submissions is extended to bias assessment across different demography groups. Lastly, an outlook on the current state of the research in training face recognition models using synthetic data is presented, and existing problems as well as potential future directions are also discussed., Comment: The 18th IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG 2024)

This study investigates the possibility of mitigating the demographic biases that affect face recognition technologies through the use of synthetic data. Demographic biases have the potential to impact individuals from specific demographic groups, and can be identified by observing disparate performance of face recognition systems across demographic groups. They primarily arise from the unequal representations of demographic groups in the training data. In recent times, synthetic data have emerged as a solution to some problems that affect face recognition systems. In particular, during the generation process it is possible to specify the desired demographic and facial attributes of images, in order to control the demographic distribution of the synthesized dataset, and fairly represent the different demographic groups. We propose to fine-tune with synthetic data existing face recognition systems that present some demographic biases. We use synthetic datasets generated with GANDiffFace, a novel framework able to synthesize datasets for face recognition with controllable demographic distribution and realistic intra-class variations. We consider multiple datasets representing different demographic groups for training and evaluation. Also, we fine-tune different face recognition systems, and evaluate their demographic fairness with different metrics. Our results support the proposed approach and the use of synthetic data to mitigate demographic biases in face recognition., Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures

Despite the widespread adoption of face recognition technology around the world, and its remarkable performance on current benchmarks, there are still several challenges that must be covered in more detail. This paper offers an overview of the Face Recognition Challenge in the Era of Synthetic Data (FRCSyn) organized at WACV 2024. This is the first international challenge aiming to explore the use of synthetic data in face recognition to address existing limitations in the technology. Specifically, the FRCSyn Challenge targets concerns related to data privacy issues, demographic biases, generalization to unseen scenarios, and performance limitations in challenging scenarios, including significant age disparities between enrollment and testing, pose variations, and occlusions. The results achieved in the FRCSyn Challenge, together with the proposed benchmark, contribute significantly to the application of synthetic data to improve face recognition technology., Comment: 10 pages, 1 figure, WACV 2024 Workshops

The application of mobile biometrics as a user-friendly authentication method has increased in the last years. Recent studies have proposed novel behavioral biometric recognition systems based on Transformers, which currently outperform the state of the art in several application scenarios. On-line handwritten signature verification aims to verify the identity of subjects, based on their biometric signatures acquired using electronic devices such as tablets or smartphones. This paper investigates the suitability of architectures based on recent Transformers for on-line signature verification. In particular, four different configurations are studied, two of them rely on the Vanilla Transformer encoder, and the two others have been successfully applied to the tasks of gait and activity recognition. We evaluate the four proposed configurations according to the experimental protocol proposed in the SVC-onGoing competition. The results obtained in our experiments are promising, and promote the use of Transformers for on-line signature verification., Comment: 2 pages, 2 figures

Face recognition systems have significantly advanced in recent years, driven by the availability of large-scale datasets. However, several issues have recently came up, including privacy concerns that have led to the discontinuation of well-established public datasets. Synthetic datasets have emerged as a solution, even though current synthesis methods present other drawbacks such as limited intra-class variations, lack of realism, and unfair representation of demographic groups. This study introduces GANDiffFace, a novel framework for the generation of synthetic datasets for face recognition that combines the power of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Diffusion models to overcome the limitations of existing synthetic datasets. In GANDiffFace, we first propose the use of GANs to synthesize highly realistic identities and meet target demographic distributions. Subsequently, we fine-tune Diffusion models with the images generated with GANs, synthesizing multiple images of the same identity with a variety of accessories, poses, expressions, and contexts. We generate multiple synthetic datasets by changing GANDiffFace settings, and compare their mated and non-mated score distributions with the distributions provided by popular real-world datasets for face recognition, i.e. VGG2 and IJB-C. Our results show the feasibility of the proposed GANDiffFace, in particular the use of Diffusion models to enhance the (limited) intra-class variations provided by GANs towards the level of real-world datasets., Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures

Shape matching is a fundamental problem in computer graphics with many applications. Functional maps translate the point-wise shape-matching problem into its functional counterpart and have inspired numerous solutions over the last decade. Nearly all the solutions based on functional maps rely on the eigenfunctions of the Laplace-Beltrami Operator (LB) to describe the functional spaces defined on the surfaces and then convert the functional correspondences into point-wise correspondences. However, this final step is often error-prone and inaccurate in tiny regions and protrusions, where the energy of LB does not uniformly cover the surface. We propose a new functional basis Principal Components of a Dictionary (PCD) to address such intrinsic limitation. PCD constructs an orthonormal basis from the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of a dictionary of functions defined over the shape. These dictionaries can target specific properties of the final basis, such as achieving an even spreading of energy. Our experimental evaluation compares seven different dictionaries on established benchmarks, showing that PCD is suited to target different shape-matching scenarios, resulting in more accurate point-wise maps than the LB basis when used in the same pipeline. This evidence provides a promising alternative for improving correspondence estimation, confirming the power and flexibility of functional maps., Comment: 22 pages, 12 figures

In this paper, we benchmark several cancelable biometrics (CB) schemes on different biometric characteristics. We consider BioHashing, Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) Hashing, Bloom Filters, and two schemes based on Index-of-Maximum (IoM) Hashing (i.e., IoM-URP and IoM-GRP). In addition to the mentioned CB schemes, we introduce a CB scheme (as a baseline) based on user-specific random transformations followed by binarization. We evaluate the unlinkability, irreversibility, and recognition performance (which are the required criteria by the ISO/IEC 24745 standard) of these CB schemes on deep learning based templates extracted from different physiological and behavioral biometric characteristics including face, voice, finger vein, and iris. In addition, we provide an open-source implementation of all the experiments presented to facilitate the reproducibility of our results.

Privacy-enhancing technologies are technologies that implement fundamental data protection principles. With respect to biometric recognition, different types of privacy-enhancing technologies have been introduced for protecting stored biometric data which are generally classified as sensitive. In this regard, various taxonomies and conceptual categorizations have been proposed and standardization activities have been carried out. However, these efforts have mainly been devoted to certain sub-categories of privacy-enhancing technologies and therefore lack generalization. This work provides an overview of concepts of privacy-enhancing technologies for biometrics in a unified framework. Key aspects and differences between existing concepts are highlighted in detail at each processing step. Fundamental properties and limitations of existing approaches are discussed and related to data protection techniques and principles. Moreover, scenarios and methods for the assessment of privacy-enhancing technologies for biometrics are presented. This paper is meant as a point of entry to the field of biometric data protection and is directed towards experienced researchers as well as non-experts., Comment: 12 pages, 2 figures

In graph learning, maps between graphs and their subgraphs frequently arise. For instance, when coarsening or rewiring operations are present along the pipeline, one needs to keep track of the corresponding nodes between the original and modified graphs. Classically, these maps are represented as binary node-to-node correspondence matrices and used as-is to transfer node-wise features between the graphs. In this paper, we argue that simply changing this map representation can bring notable benefits to graph learning tasks. Drawing inspiration from recent progress in geometry processing, we introduce a spectral representation for maps that is easy to integrate into existing graph learning models. This spectral representation is a compact and straightforward plug-in replacement and is robust to topological changes of the graphs. Remarkably, the representation exhibits structural properties that make it interpretable, drawing an analogy with recent results on smooth manifolds. We demonstrate the benefits of incorporating spectral maps in graph learning pipelines, addressing scenarios where a node-to-node map is not well defined, or in the absence of exact isomorphism. Our approach bears practical benefits in knowledge distillation and hierarchical learning, where we show comparable or improved performance at a fraction of the computational cost.

In this paper, we introduce complex functional maps, which extend the functional map framework to conformal maps between tangent vector fields on surfaces. A key property of these maps is their orientation awareness. More specifically, we demonstrate that unlike regular functional maps that link functional spaces of two manifolds, our complex functional maps establish a link between oriented tangent bundles, thus permitting robust and efficient transfer of tangent vector fields. By first endowing and then exploiting the tangent bundle of each shape with a complex structure, the resulting operations become naturally orientationaware, thus favoring orientation and angle preserving correspondence across shapes, without relying on descriptors or extra regularization. Finally, and perhaps more importantly, we demonstrate how these objects enable several practical applications within the functional map framework. We show that functional maps and their complex counterparts can be estimated jointly to promote orientation preservation, regularizing pipelines that previously suffered from orientation-reversing symmetry errors.

Many innovative applications require establishing correspondences among 3D geometric objects. However, the countless possible deformations of smooth surfaces make shape matching a challenging task. Finding an embedding to represent the different shapes in high-dimensional space where the matching is easier to solve is a well-trodden path that has given many outstanding solutions. Recently, a new trend has shown advantages in learning such representations. This novel idea motivated us to investigate which properties differentiate these data-driven embeddings and which ones promote state-of-the-art results. In this study, we analyze, for the first time, properties that arise in data-driven learned embedding and their relation to the shape-matching task. Our discoveries highlight the close link between matching and smoothness, which naturally emerge from training. Also, we demonstrate the relation between the orthogonality of the embedding and the bijectivity of the correspondence. Our experiments show exciting results, overcoming well-established alternatives and shedding a different light on relevant contexts and properties for learned embeddings.

Many natural shapes have most of their characterizing features concentrated over a few regions in space. For example, humans and animals have distinctive head shapes, while inorganic objects like chairs and airplanes are made of well-localized functional parts with specific geometric features. Often, these features are strongly correlated -- a modification of facial traits in a quadruped should induce changes to the body structure. However, in shape modelling applications, these types of edits are among the hardest ones; they require high precision, but also a global awareness of the entire shape. Even in the deep learning era, obtaining manipulable representations that satisfy such requirements is an open problem posing significant constraints. In this work, we address this problem by defining a data-driven model upon a family of linear operators (variants of the mesh Laplacian), whose spectra capture global and local geometric properties of the shape at hand. Modifications to these spectra are translated to semantically valid deformations of the corresponding surface. By explicitly decoupling the global from the local surface features, our pipeline allows to perform local edits while simultaneously maintaining a global stylistic coherence. We empirically demonstrate how our learning-based model generalizes to shape representations not seen at training time, and we systematically analyze different choices of local operators over diverse shape categories., Comment: Accepted at SGP2022

In this paper, we propose a transformer-based procedure for the efficient registration of non-rigid 3D point clouds. The proposed approach is data-driven and adopts for the first time the transformer architecture in the registration task. Our method is general and applies to different settings. Given a fixed template with some desired properties (e.g. skinning weights or other animation cues), we can register raw acquired data to it, thereby transferring all the template properties to the input geometry. Alternatively, given a pair of shapes, our method can register the first onto the second (or vice-versa), obtaining a high-quality dense correspondence between the two. In both contexts, the quality of our results enables us to target real applications such as texture transfer and shape interpolation. Furthermore, we also show that including an estimation of the underlying density of the surface eases the learning process. By exploiting the potential of this architecture, we can train our model requiring only a sparse set of ground truth correspondences ($10\sim20\%$ of the total points). The proposed model and the analysis that we perform pave the way for future exploration of transformer-based architectures for registration and matching applications. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that our pipeline outperforms state-of-the-art methods for deformable and unordered 3D data registration on different datasets and scenarios.

In this paper, we propose a fully differentiable pipeline for estimating accurate dense correspondences between 3D point clouds. The proposed pipeline is an extension and a generalization of the functional maps framework. However, instead of using the Laplace-Beltrami eigenfunctions as done in virtually all previous works in this domain, we demonstrate that learning the basis from data can both improve robustness and lead to better accuracy in challenging settings. We interpret the basis as a learned embedding into a higher dimensional space. Following the functional map paradigm the optimal transformation in this embedding space must be linear and we propose a separate architecture aimed at estimating the transformation by learning optimal descriptor functions. This leads to the first end-to-end trainable functional map-based correspondence approach in which both the basis and the descriptors are learned from data. Interestingly, we also observe that learning a \emph{canonical} embedding leads to worse results, suggesting that leaving an extra linear degree of freedom to the embedding network gives it more robustness, thereby also shedding light onto the success of previous methods. Finally, we demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art results in challenging non-rigid 3D point cloud correspondence applications.

We propose a new approach for 3D shape matching of deformable human shapes. Our approach is based on the joint adoption of three different tools: an intrinsic spectral matching pipeline, a morphable model, and an extrinsic details refinement. By operating in conjunction, these tools allow us to greatly improve the quality of the matching while at the same time resolving the key issues exhibited by each tool individually. In this paper we present an innovative High-Resolution Augmentation (HRA) strategy that enables highly accurate correspondence even in the presence of significant mesh resolution mismatch between the input shapes. This augmentation provides an effective workaround for the resolution limitations imposed by the adopted morphable model. The HRA in its global and localized versions represents a novel refinement strategy for surface subdivision methods. We demonstrate the accuracy of the proposed pipeline on multiple challenging benchmarks, and showcase its effectiveness in surface registration and texture transfer.

We propose a filtering feature selection framework that considers subsets of features as paths in a graph, where a node is a feature and an edge indicates pairwise (customizable) relations among features, dealing with relevance and redundancy principles. By two different interpretations (exploiting properties of power series of matrices and relying on Markov chains fundamentals) we can evaluate the values of paths (i.e., feature subsets) of arbitrary lengths, eventually go to infinite, from which we dub our framework Infinite Feature Selection (Inf-FS). Going to infinite allows to constrain the computational complexity of the selection process, and to rank the features in an elegant way, that is, considering the value of any path (subset) containing a particular feature. We also propose a simple unsupervised strategy to cut the ranking, so providing the subset of features to keep. In the experiments, we analyze diverse settings with heterogeneous features, for a total of 11 benchmarks, comparing against 18 widely-known comparative approaches. The results show that Inf-FS behaves better in almost any situation, that is, when the number of features to keep are fixed a priori, or when the decision of the subset cardinality is part of the process., Comment: TPAMI PREPRINT 2020

We introduce the first learning-based method for recovering shapes from Laplacian spectra. Given an auto-encoder, our model takes the form of a cycle-consistent module to map latent vectors to sequences of eigenvalues. This module provides an efficient and effective linkage between spectrum and geometry of a given shape. Our data-driven approach replaces the need for ad-hoc regularizers required by prior methods, while providing more accurate results at a fraction of the computational cost. Our learning model applies without modifications across different dimensions (2D and 3D shapes alike), representations (meshes, contours and point clouds), as well as across different shape classes, and admits arbitrary resolution of the input spectrum without affecting complexity. The increased flexibility allows us to provide a proxy to differentiable eigendecomposition and to address notoriously difficult tasks in 3D vision and geometry processing within a unified framework, including shape generation from spectrum, mesh super-resolution, shape exploration, style transfer, spectrum estimation from point clouds, segmentation transfer and point-to-point matching.

We introduce a new method for non-rigid registration of 3D human shapes. Our proposed pipeline builds upon a given parametric model of the human, and makes use of the functional map representation for encoding and inferring shape maps throughout the registration process. This combination endows our method with robustness to a large variety of nuisances observed in practical settings, including non-isometric transformations, downsampling, topological noise, and occlusions; further, the pipeline can be applied invariably across different shape representations (e.g. meshes and point clouds), and in the presence of (even dramatic) missing parts such as those arising in real-world depth sensing applications. We showcase our method on a selection of challenging tasks, demonstrating results in line with, or even surpassing, state-of-the-art methods in the respective areas., Comment: Under submission to CGF

Feature selection is playing an increasingly significant role with respect to many computer vision applications spanning from object recognition to visual object tracking. However, most of the recent solutions in feature selection are not robust across different and heterogeneous set of data. In this paper, we address this issue proposing a robust probabilistic latent graph-based feature selection algorithm that performs the ranking step while considering all the possible subsets of features, as paths on a graph, bypassing the combinatorial problem analytically. An appealing characteristic of the approach is that it aims to discover an abstraction behind low-level sensory data, that is, relevancy. Relevancy is modelled as a latent variable in a PLSA-inspired generative process that allows the investigation of the importance of a feature when injected into an arbitrary set of cues. The proposed method has been tested on ten diverse benchmarks, and compared against eleven state of the art feature selection methods. Results show that the proposed approach attains the highest performance levels across many different scenarios and difficulties, thereby confirming its strong robustness while setting a new state of the art in feature selection domain., Comment: Accepted at the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2017, Venice. Preprint copy

In an era where accumulating data is easy and storing it inexpensive, feature selection plays a central role in helping to reduce the high-dimensionality of huge amounts of otherwise meaningless data. In this paper, we propose a graph-based method for feature selection that ranks features by identifying the most important ones into arbitrary set of cues. Mapping the problem on an affinity graph-where features are the nodes-the solution is given by assessing the importance of nodes through some indicators of centrality, in particular, the Eigen-vector Centrality (EC). The gist of EC is to estimate the importance of a feature as a function of the importance of its neighbors. Ranking central nodes individuates candidate features, which turn out to be effective from a classification point of view, as proved by a thoroughly experimental section. Our approach has been tested on 7 diverse datasets from recent literature (e.g., biological data and object recognition, among others), and compared against filter, embedded and wrappers methods. The results are remarkable in terms of accuracy, stability and low execution time., Comment: Preprint version - Lecture Notes in Computer Science - Springer 2017

DFST proposes an optimized visual tracking algorithm based on the real-time selection of locally and temporally discriminative features. A feature selection mechanism is embedded in the Adaptive colour Names (CN) tracking system that adaptively selects the top-ranked discriminative features for tracking. DFST provides a significant gain in accuracy and precision allowing the use of a dynamic set of features that results in an increased system flexibility. DFST is based on the unsupervised method "Infinite Feature Selection" (Inf-FS), which ranks features according with their "redundancy" without using class labels. By using a fast online algorithm for learning dictionaries the size of the box is adapted during the processing. At each update, we use multiple examples around the target (at different positions and scales). DFST also improved the CN by adding micro-shift at the predicted position and bounding box adaptation., Comment: The paper will appear in the USB ECCV workshops proceedings and on the IEEE Xplore. The results will be presented at VOT2016 workshop which will take place on 10.12 at ECCV2016. In the days following the workshop, the raw results of the submitted trackers as well as the results paper will be made publicly available from the VOT homepage