Dihong Gong

Hidden Factor Analysis for Age Invariant Face Recognition

Age invariant face recognition has received increasing attention due to its great potential in real world applications. In spite of the great progress in face recognition techniques, reliably recognizing faces across ages remains a difficult task. The facial appearance of a person changes substantially over time, resulting in significant intra-class variations. Hence, the key to tackle this problem is to separate the variation caused by aging from the person-specific features that are stable. Specifically, we propose a new method, called Hidden Factor Analysis (HFA). This method captures the intuition above through a probabilistic model with two latent factors: an identity factor that is age-invariant and an age factor affected by the aging process. Then, the observed appearance can be modeled as a combination of the components generated based on these factors. We also develop a learning algorithm that jointly estimates the latent factors and the model parameters using an EM procedure. Extensive experiments on two well-known public domain face aging datasets: MORPH (the largest public face aging database) and FGNET, clearly show that the proposed method achieves notable improvement over state-of-the-art algorithms.

A maximum entropy feature descriptor for age invariant face recognition

In this paper, we propose a new approach to overcome the representation and matching problems in age invariant face recognition. First, a new maximum entropy feature descriptor (MEFD) is developed that encodes the microstructure of facial images into a set of discrete codes in terms of maximum entropy. By densely sampling the encoded face image, sufficient discriminatory and expressive information can be extracted for further analysis. A new matching method is also developed, called identity factor analysis (IFA), to estimate the probability that two faces have the same underlying identity. The effectiveness of the framework is confirmed by extensive experimentation on two face aging datasets, MORPH (the largest public-domain face aging dataset) and FGNET. We also conduct experiments on the famous LFW dataset to demonstrate the excellent generalizability of our new approach.

Learning Compact Feature Descriptor and Adaptive Matching Framework for Face Recognition

Dense feature extraction is becoming increasingly popular in face recognition tasks. Systems based on this approach have demonstrated impressive performance in a range of challenging scenarios. However, improvements in discriminative power come at a computational cost and with a risk of over-fitting. In this paper, we propose a new approach to dense feature extraction for face recognition, which consists of two steps. First, an encoding scheme is devised that compresses high-dimensional dense features into a compact representation by maximizing the intrauser correlation. Second, we develop an adaptive feature matching algorithm for effective classification. This matching method, in contrast to the previous methods, constructs and chooses a small subset of training samples for adaptive matching, resulting in further performance gains. Experiments using several challenging face databases, including labeled Faces in the Wild data set, Morph Album 2, CUHK optical-infrared, and FERET, demonstrate that the proposed approach consistently outperforms the current state of the art.

Aging Face Recognition: A Hierarchical Learning Model Based on Local Patterns Selection

Aging face recognition refers to matching the same persons faces across different ages, e.g., matching a persons older face to his (or her) younger one, which has many important practical applications, such as finding missing children. The major challenge of this task is that facial appearance is subject to significant change during the aging process. In this paper, we propose to solve the problem with a hierarchical model based on two-level learning. At the first level, effective features are learned from low-level microstructures, based on our new feature descriptor called local pattern selection (LPS). The proposed LPS descriptor greedily selects low-level discriminant patterns in a way, such that intra-user dissimilarity is minimized. At the second level, higher level visual information is further refined based on the output from the first level. To evaluate the performance of our new method, we conduct extensive experiments on the MORPH data set (the largest face aging data set available in the public domain), which show a significant improvement in accuracy over the state-of-the-art methods.

Common Feature Discriminant Analysis for Matching Infrared Face Images to Optical Face Images

In biometrics research and industry, it is critical yet a challenge to match infrared face images to optical face images. The major difficulty lies in the fact that a great discrepancy exists between the infrared face image and corresponding optical face image because they are captured by different devices (optical imaging device and infrared imaging device). This paper presents a new approach called common feature discriminant analysis to reduce this great discrepancy and improve optical-infrared face recognition performance. In this approach, a new learning-based face descriptor is first proposed to extract the common features from heterogeneous face images (infrared face images and optical face images), and an effective matching method is then applied to the resulting features to obtain the final decision. Extensive experiments are conducted on two large and challenging optical-infrared face data sets to show the superiority of our approach over the state-of-the-art.

Multi-feature canonical correlation analysis for face photo-sketch image retrieval

Automatic face photo-sketch image retrieval has attracted great attention in recent years due to its important applications in real life. The major difficulty in automatic face photo-sketch image retrieval lies in the fact that there exists great discrepancy between the different image modalities (photo and sketch). In order to reduce such discrepancy and improve the performance of automatic face photo-sketch image retrieval, we propose a new framework called multi-feature canonical correlation analysis (MCCA) to effectively address this problem. The MCCA is an extension and improvement of the canonical correlation analysis (CCA) algorithmusing multiple features combined with two different random sampling methods in feature space and sample space. In this framework, we first represent each photo or sketch using a patch-based local feature representation scheme, in which histograms of oriented gradients (HOG) and multi-scale local binary pattern (MLBP) serve as the local descriptors. Canonical correlation analysis (CCA) is then performed on a collection of random subspaces to construct an ensemble of classifiers for photo-sketch image retrieval. Extensive experiments on two public-domain face photo-sketch datasets (CUFS and CUFSF) clearly show that the proposed approach obtains a substantial improvement over the state-of-the-art.

Mutual Component Analysis for Heterogeneous Face Recognition

Heterogeneous face recognition, also known as cross-modality face recognition or intermodality face recognition, refers to matching two face images from alternative image modalities. Since face images from different image modalities of the same person are associated with the same face object, there should be mutual components that reflect those intrinsic face characteristics that are invariant to the image modalities. Motivated by this rationality, we propose a novel approach called Mutual Component Analysis (MCA) to infer the mutual components for robust heterogeneous face recognition. In the MCA approach, a generative model is first proposed to model the process of generating face images in different modalities, and then an Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm is designed to iteratively learn the model parameters. The learned generative model is able to infer the mutual components (which we call the hidden factor, where hidden means the factor is unreachable and invisible, and can only be inferred from observations) that are associated with the person’s identity, thus enabling fast and effective matching for cross-modality face recognition. To enhance recognition performance, we propose an MCA-based multiclassifier framework using multiple local features. Experimental results show that our new approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art results on two typical application scenarios: sketch-to-photo and infrared-to-visible face recognition.

Orthogonal Gaussian Process for Automatic Age Estimation

Age Estimation from facial images has been receiving increasing interest due to its important applications. Among the existing age estimation algorithms, the personalized approaches have been shown to be the most effective ones. However, most of the person-specific approaches (e.g. MTWGP [1], AGES [2], WAS [3]) rely heavily on the availability of training images across different ages for a single subject, which is very difficult to satisfy in practical applications. In order to overcome this problem, we propose a new approach to age estimation, called Orthogonal Gaussian Process (OGP). Compared to standard Gaussian Process, OGP is much more efficient while maintaining the discriminatory power of the standard Gaussian Process. Based on OGP, we further propose an improvement of OGP called anisotropic OGP (A-OGP) to enhance the age estimation performance. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the state-of-the-art estimation accuracy of our new algorithm on several public-domain face aging datasets: FG-NET face dataset with 82 different subjects, Morph Album 1 dataset with more than 600 subjects, and Morph Album 2 with about 20,000 different subjects.

Heterogeneous Face Recognition: A Common Encoding Feature Discriminant Approach

Heterogeneous face recognition is an important, yet challenging problem in face recognition community. It refers to matching a probe face image to a gallery of face images taken from alternate imaging modality. The major challenge of heterogeneous face recognition lies in the great discrepancies between different image modalities. Conventional face feature descriptors, e.g., local binary patterns, histogram of oriented gradients, and scale-invariant feature transform, are mostly designed in a handcrafted way and thus generally fail to extract the common discriminant information from the heterogeneous face images. In this paper, we propose a new feature descriptor called common encoding model for heterogeneous face recognition, which is able to capture common discriminant information, such that the large modality gap can be significantly reduced at the feature extraction stage. Specifically, we turn a face image into an encoded one with the encoding model learned from the training data, where the difference of the encoded heterogeneous face images of the same person can be minimized. Based on the encoded face images, we further develop a discriminant matching method to infer the hidden identity information of the cross-modality face images for enhanced recognition performance. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated (on several public-domain face datasets) in two typical heterogeneous face recognition scenarios: matching NIR faces to VIS faces and matching sketches to photographs.

Hierarchical decomposition of dynamically evolving regulatory networks

BackgroundGene regulatory networks describe the interplay between genes and their products. These networks control almost every biological activity in the cell through interactions. The hierarchy of genes in these networks as defined by their interactions gives important insights into how these functions are governed. Accurately determining the hierarchy of genes is however a computationally difficult problem. This problem is further complicated by the fact that an intrinsic characteristic of regulatory networks is that the wiring of interactions can change over time. Determining how the hierarchy in the gene regulatory networks changes with dynamically evolving network topology remains to be an unsolved challenge.ResultsIn this study, we develop a new method, named D-HIDEN (Dynamic-HIerarchical DEcomposition of Networks) to find the hierarchy of the genes in dynamically evolving gene regulatory network topologies. Unlike earlier methods, which recompute the hierarchy from scratch when the network topology changes, our method adapts the hierarchy based on the wiring of the interactions only for the nodes which have the potential to move in the hierarchy.ConclusionsWe compare D-HIDEN to five currently available hierarchical decomposition methods on synthetic and real gene regulatory networks. Our experiments demonstrate that D-HIDEN significantly outperforms existing methods in running time, accuracy, or both. Furthermore, our method is robust against dynamic changes in hierarchy. Our experiments on human gene regulatory networks suggest that our method may be used to reconstruct hierarchy in gene regulatory networks.