Matthieu Guillaumin

Is that you? Metric learning approaches for face identification

Face identification is the problem of determining whether two face images depict the same person or not. This is difficult due to variations in scale, pose, lighting, background, expression, hairstyle, and glasses. In this paper we present two methods for learning robust distance measures: (a) a logistic discriminant approach which learns the metric from a set of labelled image pairs (LDML) and (b) a nearest neighbour approach which computes the probability for two images to belong to the same class (MkNN). We evaluate our approaches on the Labeled Faces in the Wild data set, a large and very challenging data set of faces from Yahoo! News. The evaluation protocol for this data set defines a restricted setting, where a fixed set of positive and negative image pairs is given, as well as an unrestricted one, where faces are labelled by their identity. We are the first to present results for the unrestricted setting, and show that our methods benefit from this richer training data, much more so than the current state-of-the-art method. Our results of 79.3% and 87.5% correct for the restricted and unrestricted setting respectively, significantly improve over the current state-of-the-art result of 78.5%. Confidence scores obtained for face identification can be used for many applications e.g. clustering or recognition from a single training example. We show that our learned metrics also improve performance for these tasks.

TagProp: Discriminative metric learning in nearest neighbor models for image auto-annotation

Image auto-annotation is an important open problem in computer vision. For this task we propose TagProp, a discriminatively trained nearest neighbor model. Tags of test images are predicted using a weighted nearest-neighbor model to exploit labeled training images. Neighbor weights are based on neighbor rank or distance. TagProp allows the integration of metric learning by directly maximizing the log-likelihood of the tag predictions in the training set. In this manner, we can optimally combine a collection of image similarity metrics that cover different aspects of image content, such as local shape descriptors, or global color histograms. We also introduce a word specific sigmoidal modulation of the weighted neighbor tag predictions to boost the recall of rare words. We investigate the performance of different variants of our model and compare to existing work. We present experimental results for three challenging data sets. On all three, TagProp makes a marked improvement as compared to the current state-of-the-art.

Multimodal semi-supervised learning for image classification

In image categorization the goal is to decide if an image belongs to a certain category or not. A binary classifier can be learned from manually labeled images; while using more labeled examples improves performance, obtaining the image labels is a time consuming process. We are interested in how other sources of information can aid the learning process given a fixed amount of labeled images. In particular, we consider a scenario where keywords are associated with the training images, e.g. as found on photo sharing websites. The goal is to learn a classifier for images alone, but we will use the keywords associated with labeled and unlabeled images to improve the classifier using semi-supervised learning. We first learn a strong Multiple Kernel Learning (MKL) classifier using both the image content and keywords, and use it to score unlabeled images. We then learn classifiers on visual features only, either support vector machines (SVM) or least-squares regression (LSR), from the MKL output values on both the labeled and unlabeled images. In our experiments on 20 classes from the PASCAL VOC07 set and 38 from the MIR Flickr set, we demonstrate the benefit of our semi-supervised approach over only using the labeled images. We also present results for a scenario where we do not use any manual labeling but directly learn classifiers from the image tags. The semi-supervised approach also improves classification accuracy in this case.

Multiple instance metric learning from automatically labeled bags of faces

Metric learning aims at finding a distance that approximates a task-specific notion of semantic similarity. Typically, a Mahalanobis distance is learned from pairs of data labeled as being semantically similar or not. In this paper, we learn such metrics in a weakly supervised setting where bags of instances are labeled with bags of labels. We formulate the problem as a multiple instance learning (MIL) problem over pairs of bags. If two bags share at least one label, we label the pair positive, and negative otherwise. We propose to learn a metric using those labeled pairs of bags, leading to MildML, for multiple instance logistic discriminant metric learning. MildML iterates between updates of the metric and selection of putative positive pairs of examples from positive pairs of bags. To evaluate our approach, we introduce a large and challenging data set, Labeled Yahoo! News, which we have manually annotated and contains 31147 detected faces of 5873 different people in 20071 images. We group the faces detected in an image into a bag, and group the names detected in the caption into a corresponding set of labels. When the labels come from manual annotation, we find that MildML using the bag-level annotation performs as well as fully supervised metric learning using instance-level annotation. We also consider performance in the case of automatically extracted labels for the bags, where some of the bag labels do not correspond to any example in the bag. In this case MildML works substantially better than relying on noisy instance-level annotations derived from the bag-level annotation by resolving face-name associations in images with their captions.

Image annotation with tagprop on the MIRFLICKR set

Image annotation is an important computer vision problem where the goal is to determine the relevance of annotation terms for images. Image annotation has two main applications: (i) proposing a list of relevant terms to users that want to assign indexing terms to images, and (ii) supporting keyword based search for images without indexing terms, using the relevance estimates to rank images.n In this paper we present TagProp, a weighted nearest neighbour model that predicts the term relevance of images by taking a weighted sum of the annotations of the visually most similar images in an annotated training set. TagProp can use a collection of distance measures capturing different aspects of image content, such as local shape descriptors, and global colour histograms. It automatically finds the optimal combination of distances to define the visual neighbours of images that are most useful for annotation prediction. TagProp compensates for the varying frequencies of annotation terms using a term-specific sigmoid to scale the weighted nearest neighbour tag predictions.n We evaluate different variants of TagProp with experiments on the MIR Flickr set, and compare with an approach that learns a separate SVM classifier for each annotation term. We also consider using Flickr tags to train our models, both as additional features and as training labels. We find the SVMs to work better when learning from the manual annotations, but TagProp to work better when learning from the Flickr tags. We also find that using the Flickr tags as a feature can significantly improve the performance of SVMs learned from manual annotations.

Automatic face naming with caption-based supervision

We consider two scenarios of naming people in databases of news photos with captions: (i) finding faces of a single person, and (ii) assigning names to all faces. We combine an initial text-based step, that restricts the name assigned to a face to the set of names appearing in the caption, with a second step that analyzes visual features of faces. By searching for groups of highly similar faces that can be associated with a name, the results of purely text-based search can be greatly ameliorated. We improve a recent graph-based approach, in which nodes correspond to faces and edges connect highly similar faces. We introduce constraints when optimizing the objective function, and propose improvements in the low-level methods used to construct the graphs. Furthermore, we generalize the graph-based approach to face naming in the full data set. In this multi-person naming case the optimization quickly becomes computationally demanding, and we present an important speed-up using graph-flows to compute the optimal name assignments in documents. Generative models have previously been proposed to solve the multi-person naming task. We compare the generative and graph-based methods in both scenarios, and find significantly better performance using the graph-based methods in both cases.

Face Recognition from Caption-Based Supervision

In this paper, we present methods for face recognition using a collection of images with captions. We consider two tasks: retrieving all faces of a particular person in a data set, and establishing the correct association between the names in the captions and the faces in the images. This is challenging because of the very large appearance variation in the images, as well as the potential mismatch between images and their captions.For both tasks, we compare generative and discriminative probabilistic models, as well as methods that maximize subgraph densities in similarity graphs. We extend them by considering different metric learning techniques to obtain appropriate face representations that reduce intra person variability and increase inter person separation. For the retrieval task, we also study the benefit of query expansion.To evaluate performance, we use a new fully labeled data set of 31147 faces which extends the recent Labeled Faces in the Wild data set. We present extensive experimental results which show that metric learning significantly improves the performance of all approaches on both tasks.