Ming-Hsuan Yang

Detecting faces in images: a survey

Images containing faces are essential to intelligent vision-based human-computer interaction, and research efforts in face processing include face recognition, face tracking, pose estimation and expression recognition. However, many reported methods assume that the faces in an image or an image sequence have been identified and localized. To build fully automated systems that analyze the information contained in face images, robust and efficient face detection algorithms are required. Given a single image, the goal of face detection is to identify all image regions which contain a face, regardless of its 3D position, orientation and lighting conditions. Such a problem is challenging because faces are non-rigid and have a high degree of variability in size, shape, color and texture. Numerous techniques have been developed to detect faces in a single image, and the purpose of this paper is to categorize and evaluate these algorithms. We also discuss relevant issues such as data collection, evaluation metrics and benchmarking. After analyzing these algorithms and identifying their limitations, we conclude with several promising directions for future research.

Incremental Learning for Robust Visual Tracking

Abstract Visual tracking, in essence, deals with non-stationary image streams that change over time. While most existing algorithms are able to track objects well in controlled environments, they usually fail in the presence of significant variation of the object’s appearance or surrounding illumination. One reason for such failures is that many algorithms employ fixed appearance models of the target. Such models are trained using only appearance data available before tracking begins, which in practice limits the range of appearances that are modeled, and ignores the large volume of information (such as shape changes or specific lighting conditions) that becomes available during tracking. In this paper, we present a tracking method that incrementally learns a low-dimensional subspace representation, efficiently adapting online to changes in the appearance of the target. The model update, based on incremental algorithms for principal component analysis, includes two important features: a method for correctly updating the sample mean, and a forgetting factor to ensure less modeling power is expended fitting older observations. Both of these features contribute measurably to improving overall tracking performance. Numerous experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed tracking algorithm in indoor and outdoor environments where the target objects undergo large changes in pose, scale, and illumination.

Online Object Tracking: A Benchmark

Object tracking is one of the most important components in numerous applications of computer vision. While much progress has been made in recent years with efforts on sharing code and datasets, it is of great importance to develop a library and benchmark to gauge the state of the art. After briefly reviewing recent advances of online object tracking, we carry out large scale experiments with various evaluation criteria to understand how these algorithms perform. The test image sequences are annotated with different attributes for performance evaluation and analysis. By analyzing quantitative results, we identify effective approaches for robust tracking and provide potential future research directions in this field.

Visual tracking with online Multiple Instance Learning

In this paper, we address the problem of learning an adaptive appearance model for object tracking. In particular, a class of tracking techniques called “tracking by detection” have been shown to give promising results at real-time speeds. These methods train a discriminative classifier in an online manner to separate the object from the background. This classifier bootstraps itself by using the current tracker state to extract positive and negative examples from the current frame. Slight inaccuracies in the tracker can therefore lead to incorrectly labeled training examples, which degrades the classifier and can cause further drift. In this paper we show that using Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) instead of traditional supervised learning avoids these problems, and can therefore lead to a more robust tracker with fewer parameter tweaks. We present a novel online MIL algorithm for object tracking that achieves superior results with real-time performance.

Robust Object Tracking with Online Multiple Instance Learning

In this paper, we address the problem of tracking an object in a video given its location in the first frame and no other information. Recently, a class of tracking techniques called “tracking by detection” has been shown to give promising results at real-time speeds. These methods train a discriminative classifier in an online manner to separate the object from the background. This classifier bootstraps itself by using the current tracker state to extract positive and negative examples from the current frame. Slight inaccuracies in the tracker can therefore lead to incorrectly labeled training examples, which degrade the classifier and can cause drift. In this paper, we show that using Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) instead of traditional supervised learning avoids these problems and can therefore lead to a more robust tracker with fewer parameter tweaks. We propose a novel online MIL algorithm for object tracking that achieves superior results with real-time performance. We present thorough experimental results (both qualitative and quantitative) on a number of challenging video clips.

Real-time compressive tracking

It is a challenging task to develop effective and efficient appearance models for robust object tracking due to factors such as pose variation, illumination change, occlusion, and motion blur. Existing online tracking algorithms often update models with samples from observations in recent frames. While much success has been demonstrated, numerous issues remain to be addressed. First, while these adaptive appearance models are data-dependent, there does not exist sufficient amount of data for online algorithms to learn at the outset. Second, online tracking algorithms often encounter the drift problems. As a result of self-taught learning, these mis-aligned samples are likely to be added and degrade the appearance models. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective and efficient tracking algorithm with an appearance model based on features extracted from the multi-scale image feature space with data-independent basis. Our appearance model employs non-adaptive random projections that preserve the structure of the image feature space of objects. A very sparse measurement matrix is adopted to efficiently extract the features for the appearance model. We compress samples of foreground targets and the background using the same sparse measurement matrix. The tracking task is formulated as a binary classification via a naive Bayes classifier with online update in the compressed domain. The proposed compressive tracking algorithm runs in real-time and performs favorably against state-of-the-art algorithms on challenging sequences in terms of efficiency, accuracy and robustness.

Visual tracking via adaptive structural local sparse appearance model

Sparse representation has been applied to visual tracking by finding the best candidate with minimal reconstruction error using target templates. However most sparse representation based trackers only consider the holistic representation and do not make full use of the sparse coefficients to discriminate between the target and the background, and hence may fail with more possibility when there is similar object or occlusion in the scene. In this paper we develop a simple yet robust tracking method based on the structural local sparse appearance model. This representation exploits both partial information and spatial information of the target based on a novel alignment-pooling method. The similarity obtained by pooling across the local patches helps not only locate the target more accurately but also handle occlusion. In addition, we employ a template update strategy which combines incremental subspace learning and sparse representation. This strategy adapts the template to the appearance change of the target with less possibility of drifting and reduces the influence of the occluded target template as well. Both qualitative and quantitative evaluations on challenging benchmark image sequences demonstrate that the proposed tracking algorithm performs favorably against several state-of-the-art methods.

Saliency Detection via Graph-Based Manifold Ranking

Most existing bottom-up methods measure the foreground saliency of a pixel or region based on its contrast within a local context or the entire image, whereas a few methods focus on segmenting out background regions and thereby salient objects. Instead of considering the contrast between the salient objects and their surrounding regions, we consider both foreground and background cues in a different way. We rank the similarity of the image elements (pixels or regions) with foreground cues or background cues via graph-based manifold ranking. The saliency of the image elements is defined based on their relevances to the given seeds or queries. We represent the image as a close-loop graph with super pixels as nodes. These nodes are ranked based on the similarity to background and foreground queries, based on affinity matrices. Saliency detection is carried out in a two-stage scheme to extract background regions and foreground salient objects efficiently. Experimental results on two large benchmark databases demonstrate the proposed method performs well when against the state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy and speed. We also create a more difficult benchmark database containing 5,172 images to test the proposed saliency model and make this database publicly available with this paper for further studies in the saliency field.

Robust object tracking via sparsity-based collaborative model

In this paper we propose a robust object tracking algorithm using a collaborative model. As the main challenge for object tracking is to account for drastic appearance change, we propose a robust appearance model that exploits both holistic templates and local representations. We develop a sparsity-based discriminative classifier (SD-C) and a sparsity-based generative model (SGM). In the S-DC module, we introduce an effective method to compute the confidence value that assigns more weights to the foreground than the background. In the SGM module, we propose a novel histogram-based method that takes the spatial information of each patch into consideration with an occlusion handing scheme. Furthermore, the update scheme considers both the latest observations and the original template, thereby enabling the tracker to deal with appearance change effectively and alleviate the drift problem. Numerous experiments on various challenging videos demonstrate that the proposed tracker performs favorably against several state-of-the-art algorithms.

Kernel Eigenfaces vs. Kernel Fisherfaces: Face recognition using kernel methods

Principal Component A nalysis and Fisher Linear Discriminant methods have demonstrated their success in fac edete ction, r ecognition and tr acking. The representations in these subspace methods are based on second order statistics of the image set, and do not address higher order statistical dependencies such as the relationships among three or more pixels. Recently Higher Order Statistics and Independent Component Analysis (ICA) have been used as informative representations for visual recognition. In this paper, we investigate the use of Kernel Principal Component Analysis and Kernel Fisher Linear Discriminant for learning low dimensional representations for face recognition, which we call Kernel Eigenface and Kernel Fisherface methods.While Eigenface and Fisherface methods aim to find projection directions based on second order correlation of samples, Kernel Eigenface and Kernel Fisherface methods provide generalizations which take higher order correlations into account. We compare the performance of kernel methods with classical algorithms such as Eigenface, Fisherface, ICA, and Support Vector Machine (SVM) within the context of appearance-based face recognition problem using two data sets where images vary in pose, scale, lighting and expression. Experimental results show that kernel methods provide better representations and achieve lower error rates for face recognition.