CS 275: Project Proposal

Face Recognition using Space Variant Image

Sensors

Team Members

1
Pranav Sodhani - 804591764
2
Atishay Aggarwal - 704758311
3
Ameya Kabre - 204732347
4
Shikhar Malhotra - 504741656
5
Pranav Bhat - 704741684

{1sodhanipranav, 2atishay5395, 3akabre, 4smalhotra, 5pranavtbhat}@cs.ucla.edu

Introduction

It is well acknowledged that Human Visual System (HVS) has evolved exceptionally well when it
comes to the task of face recognition. In order to develop artificial vision systems with human-like
ability of face recognition, a lot of research has been done since the last 2 decades at the intersection
of machine learning and image processing. However, although the goal has been to match human like
performance for face recognition tasks, the approaches followed have been quite disparate.
Traditional face recognition algorithms assume the existence of an N x M rectangular image and the
presence of a Cartesian grid defining the image structure. In such architectures, resolution (density of
pixels per unit area) is uniform across the image. On the other hand, most biological vision systems
deploy a space variant sampling with a higher concentration of photoreceptors in the fovea while
diminishing concentration towards the periphery. This allows such systems to work with significantly
lower bandwidth while still maintaining a high acuity of the visual scene at the fovea.

Inspired by human visual system, in this project, we would like to adopt a biologically plausible
approach towards the problem of face-recognition system and, to that end, propose and implement
algorithms for such tasks.

Related Work

Face recognition has a wide range of applications in the fields of biometrics (authentication systems),
surveillance (person tracking) and entertainment (VR and video games). Given the huge base of
stakeholders, research on face recognition has gained a lot of focus over the last few years [1]. A
detailed summary of popular algorithms in this domain can be found in [3]. These algorithms can be
broadly classified as belonging to 2 classes - shallow algorithms, which either extract features or
match templates for calculating a similarity score between faces and deep algorithms, which deploy
neural networks for face identification. Eigenfaces using principal component analysis (PCA) [2], one
of the most popular algorithms for face recognition, uses KL transform to reduce the dimensionality of
images while retaining most discriminating features. A nearest neighbor approach then helps find the
closest matching face. PCA based algorithms are, however, not robust to pose and illumination
changes. In [7], Vasilescu et al. develop a multi-linear algebraic framework to extend PCA and make it
pose and illumination variant. Such algorithms, however, require the presence of huge training sets
for better performance.

Images may contain higher order statistical data present in their pixels. An improved algorithm,
Independent Component Analysis (ICA) was proposed to find such basis images using the principle of
optimal information transfer through sigmoidal neurons. ICA tries to minimize both second-order and
higher-order dependencies in the input data and finds the basis along which the image data is
statistically independent. Bartlett et al. [9] discussed two such architectures. While the first one -
statistically independent basis images attempts to discover a spatially local basis for the faces in the
images, the second one produces a factorial face code. Performance evaluation demonstrates it to be
a better technique than PCA. When both the architectures are combined together, more optimal
results are obtained.

Parkhi et al. [8], extensively describe face recognition techniques using Convolutional Neural
Networks or CNNs. The key to developing a good classifier, according to the authors, is to develop a
deep network i.e., one having several layers. The face recognition problem is first modeled as a N-
way classification problem, where N is the number of distinct people in the dataset. During the
learning phase, the CNN develops a score vector, using a fully connected classifier layer. The
scores are compared to the ground truth classes by computing the softmax log-loss. Then, the fully
connected classifier layer is removed, and the generated scores for each testing image are classified
by simply picking the class with the minimum Euclidean distance. The performance of the classifier

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can be improved further by learning embeddings for score vectors. The authors describe this scheme
to be triplet-loss training.

To the best of our knowledge, there has been no work done in the realm of face recognition using
space variant sensors. The most similar work in this category assumes log-polar mapping sensors for
the task of object detection [5]. With the help of a frontal face detection task using PCA, the authors of
[5] demonstrate that such systems have the ability of recognizing faces even at a low resolution. The
idea of representing images as graphical structures instead of rectangular grids was presented by
Wallace et al. in [6]. Leo Grady in his dissertation [4], further extended the idea to develop low level
image processing operations such as image segmentation and interpolation. He has also provided
MATLAB toolbox for carrying out simple image operations using graph as the data structure for
images.

Proposed Work

In this project, we propose to develop space-variant counterparts of existing face-recognition

algorithms and evaluate them on standard face databases. Our work will lead to the following
contributions:

Demonstration of potential low level image operations such as convolution in a space-variant

context against traditional kernel based convolutions in rectangular grids

Implementation of space variant analogs of traditional face-recognition algorithms such as

PCA, ICA and deep-learning based algorithms.

Performance evaluation and comparison of the developed algorithms on standard face

databases such as ORL (AT&T), CMU Pie and Yale Face Database

This work should be a motivation to carry out future work concentrating on making the proposed
algorithms more robust to pose and illumination variations.

References

[1] Jafri, Rabia, and Hamid R. Arabnia. "A survey of face recognition techniques." Jips 5.2
(2009): 41-68.
[2] M. Turk, A. Pentland, Eigenfaces for Recognition, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Vol. 3,
No. 1, 1991, pp. 71-86
[3] W. Zhao, R. Chellappa, A. Rosenfeld, P.J. Phillips, Face Recognition: A Literature Survey,
ACM Computing Surveys, 2003, pp. 399-458
[4] Grady, Leo. "Space-variant computer vision: a graph-theoretic approach." Boston University,
Boston, MA (2004).
[5] Traver, V., et al. "Appearance-based object detection in space-variant images: a multi-model
approach." Image Analysis and Recognition (2004): 538-546.
[6] Wallace, Richard S., et al. "Space variant image processing." International Journal of
Computer Vision 13.1 (1994): 71-90.
[7] M. A. O. Vasilescu, D. Terzopoulos, Proceedings of International Conference on Pattern
Recognition (ICPR 2002), Vol. 2, Quebec City, Canada, Aug, 2002, 511-514.
[8] Parkhi, Omkar M., Andrea Vedaldi, and Andrew Zisserman. "Deep Face Recognition." BMVC.
Vol. 1. No. 3. 2015.
[9] M. Bartlett J. Movellan T. Sejnowski "Face recognition by independent component analysis"
IEEE Trans. Neural Netw. vol. 13 no. 6 pp. 1450-1464 Nov. 2002.

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Proposal for Paper Presentation (3)

1. Deep Face Recognition

a. Citation: Parkhi, Omkar M., Andrea Vedaldi, and Andrew Zisserman. "Deep Face
Recognition." BMVC. Vol. 1. No. 3. 2015.
b. URL: http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk:5000/~vgg/publications/2015/Parkhi15/parkhi15.pdf

2. Fisher Vector Faces

a. Citation: Simonyan, Karen, et al. "Fisher Vector Faces in the Wild." BMVC. Vol. 2.
No. 3. 2013.
b. URL:
https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/publications/2013/Simonyan13/extras/simonyan13_
ext.pdf

3. Tensor Faces
a. Citation: Vasilescu, M. Alex O., and Demetri Terzopoulos. "Multilinear image
analysis for facial recognition." Pattern Recognition, 2002. Proceedings. 16th
International Conference on. Vol. 2. IEEE, 2002.
b. URL: https://www.media.mit.edu/~maov/tensorfaces/icpr02.pdf

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