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This paper presents a novel Subject-dependent Deep Aging Path (SDAP), which inherits the merits of both Generative Probabilistic Modeling and Inverse Reinforcement Learning to model the facial structures and the longitudinal face aging process of a given subject. The proposed SDAP is optimized using tractable log-likelihood objective functions with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) based deep feature extraction. Instead of applying a fixed aging development path for all input faces and subjects, SDAP is able to provide the most appropriate aging development path for individual subject that optimizes the reward aging formulation. Unlike previous methods that can take only one image as the input, SDAP further allows multiple images as inputs, i.e. all information of a subject at either the same or different ages, to produce the optimal aging path for the given subject. Finally, SDAP allows efficiently synthesizing in-the-wild aging faces. The proposed model is experimented in both tasks of face aging synthesis and cross-age face verification. The experimental results consistently show SDAP achieves the state-of-the-art performance on numerous face aging databases, i.e. FG-NET, MORPH, AginG Faces in the Wild (AGFW), and Cross-Age Celebrity Dataset (CACD). Furthermore, we also evaluate the performance of SDAP on large-scale Megaface challenge to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed solution.

The research in automatic unsupervised visual clustering has received considerable attention over the last couple years. It aims at explaining distributions of unlabeled visual images by clustering them via a parameterized model of appearance. Graph Convolutional Neural Networks (GCN) have recently been one of the most popular clustering methods. However, it has reached some limitations. Firstly, it is quite sensitive to hard or noisy samples. Secondly, it is hard to investigate with various deep network models due to its computational training time. Finally, it is hard to design an end-to-end training model between the deep feature extraction and GCN clustering modeling. This work therefore presents the Clusformer, a simple but new perspective of Transformer based approach, to automatic visual clustering via its unsupervised attention mechanism. The proposed method is able to robustly deal with noisy or hard samples. It is also flexible and effective to collaborate with different deep network models with various model sizes in an end-to-end framework. The proposed method is evaluated on two popular large-scale visual databases, i.e. Google Landmark and MS-Celeb1M face database, and outperforms prior unsupervised clustering methods. Code will be available at https://github.com/VinAIResearch/Clusformer

Multi-Camera Multiple Object Tracking (MC-MOT) is a significant computer vision problem due to its emerging applicability in several real-world applications. Despite a large number of existing works, solving the data association problem in any MC-MOT pipeline is arguably one of the most challenging tasks. Developing a robust MC-MOT system, however, is still highly challenging due to many practical issues such as inconsistent lighting conditions, varying object movement patterns, or the trajectory occlusions of the objects between the cameras. To address these problems, this work, therefore, proposes a new Dynamic Graph Model with Link Prediction (DyGLIP) approach to solve the data association task. Compared to existing methods, our new model offers several advantages, including better feature representations and the ability to recover from lost tracks during camera transitions. Moreover, our model works gracefully regardless of the overlapping ratios between the cameras. Experimental results show that we outperform existing MC-MOT algorithms by a large margin on several practical datasets. Notably, our model works favorably on online settings but can be extended to an incremental approach for large-scale datasets., accepted at CVPR 2021

Recognition across domains has recently become an active topic in the research community. However, it has been largely overlooked in the problem of recognition in new unseen domains. Under this condition, the delivered deep network models are unable to be updated, adapted, or fine-tuned. Therefore, recent deep learning techniques, such as domain adaptation, feature transferring, and fine-tuning, cannot be applied. This paper presents a novel approach to the problem of domain generalization in the context of deep learning. The proposed method1 is evaluated on different datasets in various problems, i.e. (i) digit recognition on MNIST, SVHN, and MNIST-M, (ii) face recognition on Extended Yale-B, CMU-PIE and CMU-MPIE, and (iii) pedestrian recognition on RGB and Thermal image datasets. The experimental results show that our proposed method consistently improves performance accuracy. It can also be easily incorporated with any other CNN frameworks within an end-to-end deep network design for object detection and recognition problems to improve their performance.

Unveiling face images of a subject given his/her high-level representations extracted from a blackbox Face Recognition engine is extremely challenging. It is because the limitations of accessible information from that engine including its structure and uninterpretable extracted features. This paper presents a novel generative structure with Bijective Metric Learning, namely Bijective Generative Adversarial Networks in a Distillation framework (DiBiGAN), for synthesizing faces of an identity given that person's features. In order to effectively address this problem, this work firstly introduces a bijective metric so that the distance measurement and metric learning process can be directly adopted in image domain for an image reconstruction task. Secondly, a distillation process is introduced to maximize the information exploited from the blackbox face recognition engine. Then a Feature-Conditional Generator Structure with Exponential Weighting Strategy is presented for a more robust generator that can synthesize realistic faces with ID preservation. Results on several benchmarking datasets including CelebA, LFW, AgeDB, CFP-FP against matching engines have demonstrated the effectiveness of DiBiGAN on both image realism and ID preservation properties., CVPR 2020

Compressive sensing, matrix rank optimization and Robust PCA-based matrix decomposition have an increasing number of non-convex approaches for optimizing the ideal l 0 -norm sparsity. This paper presents a novel online non-convex l p -norm based Robust PCA (OLP-RPCA) approach, where 0 p

Active Contour (AC)-based segmentation has been widely used to solve many image processing problems, specially image segmentation. While these AC-based methods offer object shape constraints, they typically look for strong edges or statistical modeling for successful segmentation. Clearly, AC-based approaches lack a way to work with labeled images in a supervised machine learning framework. Furthermore, they are unsupervised approaches and strongly depend on many parameters which are chosen by empirical results. Recently, Deep Learning (DL) has become the go-to method for solving many problems in various areas. Over the past decade, DL has achieved remarkable success in various artificial intelligence research areas. DL is supervised methods and requires large volume ground-truth. This paper first provides a fundamental of both Active Contour techniques and Deep Learning framework. We then present the state-of-the-art approaches of Active Contour techniques incorporating in Deep Learning framework.

Variational Level Set (LS) has been a widely used method in medical segmentation. However, it is limited when dealing with multi-instance objects in the real world. In addition, its segmentation results are quite sensitive to initial settings and highly depend on the number of iterations. To address these issues and boost the classic variational LS methods to a new level of the learnable deep learning approaches, we propose a novel definition of contour evolution named Recurrent Level Set (RLS)} to employ Gated Recurrent Unit under the energy minimization of a variational LS functional. The curve deformation process in RLS is formed as a hidden state evolution procedure and updated by minimizing an energy functional composed of fitting forces and contour length. By sharing the convolutional features in a fully end-to-end trainable framework, we extend RLS to Contextual RLS (CRLS) to address semantic segmentation in the wild. The experimental results have shown that our proposed RLS improves both computational time and segmentation accuracy against the classic variations LS-based method, whereas the fully end-to-end system CRLS achieves competitive performance compared to the state-of-the-art semantic segmentation approaches., Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures

Deep neural networks have been widely used in numerous computer vision applications, particularly in face recognition. However, deploying deep neural network face recognition on mobile devices has recently become a trend but still limited since most high-accuracy deep models are both time and GPU consumption in the inference stage. Therefore, developing a lightweight deep neural network is one of the most practical solutions to deploy face recognition on mobile devices. Such the lightweight deep neural network requires efficient memory with small number of weights representation and low cost operators. In this paper, a novel deep neural network named MobiFace, a simple but effective approach, is proposed for productively deploying face recognition on mobile devices. The experimental results have shown that our lightweight MobiFace is able to achieve high performance with 99.73% on LFW database and 91.3% on large-scale challenging Megaface database. It is also eventually competitive against large-scale deep-networks face recognition while significant reducing computational time and memory consumption.

In the last few years there has been a lot of attention to the techniques of sparse representation and low-rank approximation. These techniques have shown important applications in many areas in image and video processing, signal analysis, computer vision and machine learning. These techniques can also be used in unsupervised and dictionary learning to uncover high-order relations in the data and to train deep neural networks. This paper is a review to discuss the latest developments and show the effectiveness of these techniques in large scale data processing problems.

Robust hand detection and classification is one of the most crucial pre-processing steps to support human computer interaction, driver behavior monitoring, virtual reality, etc. This problem, however, is very challenging due to numerous variations of hand images in real-world scenarios. This work presents a novel approach named Multiple Scale Region-based Fully Convolutional Networks (MSRFCN) to robustly detect and classify human hand regions under various challenging conditions, e.g. occlusions, illumination, low-resolutions. In this approach, the whole image is passed through the proposed fully convolutional network to compute score maps. Those score maps with their position-sensitive properties can help to efficiently address a dilemma between translation-invariance in classification and detection. The method is evaluated on the challenging hand databases, i.e. the Vision for Intelligent Vehicles and Applications (VIVA) Challenge, Oxford hand dataset and compared against various recent hand detection methods. The experimental results show that our proposed MS-FRCN approach consistently achieves the state-of-the-art hand detection results, i.e. Average Precision (AP) / Average Recall (AR) of 95.1% / 94.5% at level 1 and 86.0% / 83.4% at level 2, on the VIVA challenge. In addition, the proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art results for left/right hand and driver/passenger classification tasks on the VIVA database with a significant improvement on AP/AR of ~7% and ~13% for both classification tasks, respectively. The hand detection performance of MS-RFCN reaches to 75.1% of AP and 77.8% of AR on Oxford database.

Designed as extremely deep architectures, deep residual networks which provide a rich visual representation and offer robust convergence behaviors have recently achieved exceptional performance in numerous computer vision problems. Being directly applied to a scene labeling problem, however, they were limited to capture long-range contextual dependence, which is a critical aspect. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach, Contextual Recurrent Residual Networks (CRRN) which is able to simultaneously handle rich visual representation learning and long-range context modeling within a fully end-to-end deep network. Furthermore, our proposed end-to-end CRRN is completely trained from scratch, without using any pre-trained models in contrast to most existing methods usually fine-tuned from the state-of-the-art pre-trained models, e.g. VGG-16, ResNet, etc. The experiments are conducted on four challenging scene labeling datasets, i.e. SiftFlow, CamVid, Stanford background and SUN datasets, and compared against various state-of-the-art scene labeling methods.

Modeling the long-term facial aging process is extremely challenging due to the presence of large and non-linear variations during the face development stages. In order to efficiently address the problem, this work first decomposes the aging process into multiple short-term stages. Then, a novel generative probabilistic model, named Temporal Non-Volume Preserving (TNVP) transformation, is presented to model the facial aging process at each stage. Unlike Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), which requires an empirical balance threshold, and Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBM), an intractable model, our proposed TNVP approach guarantees a tractable density function, exact inference and evaluation for embedding the feature transformations between faces in consecutive stages. Our model shows its advantages not only in capturing the non-linear age related variance in each stage but also producing a smooth synthesis in age progression across faces. Our approach can model any face in the wild provided with only four basic landmark points. Moreover, the structure can be transformed into a deep convolutional network while keeping the advantages of probabilistic models with tractable log-likelihood density estimation. Our method is evaluated in both terms of synthesizing age-progressed faces and cross-age face verification and consistently shows the state-of-the-art results in various face aging databases, i.e. FG-NET, MORPH, AginG Faces in the Wild (AGFW), and Cross-Age Celebrity Dataset (CACD). A large-scale face verification on Megaface challenge 1 is also performed to further show the advantages of our proposed approach.

In this paper, we propose two new approaches using the Convolution Neural Network (CNN) and the Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) for tracking 3D hand poses. The first approach is a detection based algorithm while the second is a data driven method. Our first contribution is a new tracking-by-detection strategy extending the CNN based single frame detection method to a multiple frame tracking approach by taking into account prediction history using RNN. Our second contribution is the use of RNN to simulate the fitting of a 3D model to the input data. It helps to relax the need of a carefully designed fitting function and optimization algorithm. With such strategies, we show that our tracking frameworks can automatically correct the fail detection made in previous frames due to occlusions. Our proposed method is evaluated on two public hand datasets, i.e. NYU and ICVL, and compared against other recent hand tracking methods. Experimental results show that our approaches achieve the state-of-the-art accuracy and efficiency in the challenging problem of 3D hand pose estimation.

The "interpretation through synthesis" approach to analyze face images, particularly Active Appearance Models (AAMs) method, has become one of the most successful face modeling approaches over the last two decades. AAM models have ability to represent face images through synthesis using a controllable parameterized Principal Component Analysis (PCA) model. However, the accuracy and robustness of the synthesized faces of AAM are highly depended on the training sets and inherently on the generalizability of PCA subspaces. This paper presents a novel Deep Appearance Models (DAMs) approach, an efficient replacement for AAMs, to accurately capture both shape and texture of face images under large variations. In this approach, three crucial components represented in hierarchical layers are modeled using the Deep Boltzmann Machines (DBM) to robustly capture the variations of facial shapes and appearances. DAMs are therefore superior to AAMs in inferencing a representation for new face images under various challenging conditions. The proposed approach is evaluated in various applications to demonstrate its robustness and capabilities, i.e. facial super-resolution reconstruction, facial off-angle reconstruction or face frontalization, facial occlusion removal and age estimation using challenging face databases, i.e. Labeled Face Parts in the Wild (LFPW), Helen and FG-NET. Comparing to AAMs and other deep learning based approaches, the proposed DAMs achieve competitive results in those applications, thus this showed their advantages in handling occlusions, facial representation, and reconstruction.

This paper presents a novel Robust Deep Appearance Models to learn the non-linear correlation between shape and texture of face images. In this approach, two crucial components of face images, i.e. shape and texture, are represented by Deep Boltzmann Machines and Robust Deep Boltzmann Machines (RDBM), respectively. The RDBM, an alternative form of Robust Boltzmann Machines, can separate corrupted/occluded pixels in the texture modeling to achieve better reconstruction results. The two models are connected by Restricted Boltzmann Machines at the top layer to jointly learn and capture the variations of both facial shapes and appearances. This paper also introduces new fitting algorithms with occlusion awareness through the mask obtained from the RDBM reconstruction. The proposed approach is evaluated in various applications by using challenging face datasets, i.e. Labeled Face Parts in the Wild (LFPW), Helen, EURECOM and AR databases, to demonstrate its robustness and capabilities., 6 pages, 8 figures, submitted to ICPR 2016

Modeling the face aging process is a challenging task due to large and non-linear variations present in different stages of face development. This paper presents a deep model approach for face age progression that can efficiently capture the non-linear aging process and automatically synthesize a series of age-progressed faces in various age ranges. In this approach, we first decompose the long-term age progress into a sequence of short-term changes and model it as a face sequence. The Temporal Deep Restricted Boltzmann Machines based age progression model together with the prototype faces are then constructed to learn the aging transformation between faces in the sequence. In addition, to enhance the wrinkles of faces in the later age ranges, the wrinkle models are further constructed using Restricted Boltzmann Machines to capture their variations in different facial regions. The geometry constraints are also taken into account in the last step for more consistent age-progressed results. The proposed approach is evaluated using various face aging databases, i.e. FG-NET, Cross-Age Celebrity Dataset (CACD) and MORPH, and our collected large-scale aging database named AginG Faces in the Wild (AGFW). In addition, when ground-truth age is not available for input image, our proposed system is able to automatically estimate the age of the input face before aging process is employed., Comment: in The IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2016

The “interpretation through synthesis”, i.e. Active Appearance Models (AAMs) method, has received considerable attention over the past decades. It aims at “explaining” face images by synthesizing them via a parameterized model of appearance. It is quite challenging due to appearance variations of human face images, e.g. facial poses, occlusions, lighting, low resolution, etc. Since these variations are mostly non-linear, it is impossible to represent them in a linear model, such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA). This paper presents a novel Deep Appearance Models (DAMs) approach, an efficient replacement for AAMs, to accurately capture both shape and texture of face images under large variations. In this approach, three crucial components represented in hierarchical layers are modeled using the Deep Boltzmann Machines (DBM) to robustly capture the variations of facial shapes and appearances. DAMs are therefore superior to AAMs in inferring a representation for new face images under various challenging conditions. In addition, DAMs have ability to generate a compact set of parameters in higher level representation that can be used for classification, e.g. face recognition and facial age estimation. The proposed approach is evaluated in facial image reconstruction, facial super-resolution on two databases, i.e. LFPW and Helen. It is also evaluated on FG-NET database for the problem of age estimation.

Face recognition under various conditions such as illumination, poses, expression, and occlusion has been one of the most challenging problems in computer vision. Over the last few years there has been significant attention paid to the low-rank approximation (LRA) and sparse representation (SR) techniques. The applications of these techniques have appeared in many different areas ranging from handwritten character recognition to multi-factor face recognition. In this paper, we will review some of the most recent works using LRA and SR in the multi-factor face recognition problem, and present a novel framework to improve their performance in the recognition of faces under various affecting conditions. Our results are comparable to or better than the state-of-the-art in this area.