Recognizing People by Body Shape Using Deep Networks of Images and Words

Common and important applications of person identification occur at distances and viewpoints in which the face is not visible or is not sufficiently resolved to be useful. We examine body shape as a biometric across distance and viewpoint variation. We propose an approach that combines standard object classification networks with representations based on linguistic (word-based) descriptions of bodies. Algorithms with and without linguistic training were compared on their ability to identify people from body shape in images captured across a large range of distances/views (close-range, 100m, 200m, 270m, 300m, 370m, 400m, 490m, 500m, 600m, and at elevated pitch in images taken by an unmanned aerial vehicle [UAV]). Accuracy, as measured by identity-match ranking and false accept errors in an open-set test, was surprisingly good. For identity-ranking, linguistic models were more accurate for close-range images, whereas non-linguistic models fared better at intermediary distances. Fusion of the linguistic and non-linguistic embeddings improved performance at all, but the farthest distance. Although the non-linguistic model yielded fewer false accepts at all distances, fusion of the linguistic and non-linguistic models decreased false accepts for all, but the UAV images. We conclude that linguistic and non-linguistic representations of body shape can offer complementary identity information for bodies that can improve identification in applications of interest.

A Brief Survey on Person Recognition at a Distance

Person recognition at a distance entails recognizing the identity of an individual appearing in images or videos collected by long-range imaging systems such as drones or surveillance cameras. Despite recent advances in deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs), this remains challenging. Images or videos collected by long-range cameras often suffer from atmospheric turbulence, blur, low-resolution, unconstrained poses, and poor illumination. In this paper, we provide a brief survey of recent advances in person recognition at a distance. In particular, we review recent work in multi-spectral face verification, person re-identification, and gait-based analysis techniques. Furthermore, we discuss the merits and drawbacks of existing approaches and identify important, yet under explored challenges for deploying remote person recognition systems in-the-wild.

Twin identification over viewpoint change: A deep convolutional neural network surpasses humans

Deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) have achieved human-level accuracy in face identification (Phillips et al., 2018), though it is unclear how accurately they discriminate highly-similar faces. Here, humans and a DCNN performed a challenging face-identity matching task that included identical twins. Participants (N=87) viewed pairs of face images of three types: same-identity, general imposter pairs (different identities from similar demographic groups), and twin imposter pairs (identical twin siblings). The task was to determine whether the pairs showed the same person or different people. Identity comparisons were tested in three viewpoint-disparity conditions: frontal to frontal, frontal to 45-degree profile, and frontal to 90-degree profile. Accuracy for discriminating matched-identity pairs from twin-imposters and general imposters was assessed in each viewpoint-disparity condition. Humans were more accurate for general-imposter pairs than twin-imposter pairs, and accuracy declined with increased viewpoint disparity between the images in a pair. A DCNN trained for face identification (Ranjan et al., 2018) was tested on the same image pairs presented to humans. Machine performance mirrored the pattern of human accuracy, but with performance at or above all humans in all but one condition. Human and machine similarity scores were compared across all image-pair types. This item-level analysis showed that human and machine similarity ratings correlated significantly in six of nine image-pair types [range r=0.38 to r=0.63], suggesting general accord between the perception of face similarity by humans and the DCNN. These findings also contribute to our understanding of DCNN performance for discriminating high-resemblance faces, demonstrate that the DCNN performs at a level at or above humans, and suggest a degree of parity between the features used by humans and the DCNN.

Where in the World is this Image? Transformer-based Geo-localization in the Wild

Predicting the geographic location (geo-localization) from a single ground-level RGB image taken anywhere in the world is a very challenging problem. The challenges include huge diversity of images due to different environmental scenarios, drastic variation in the appearance of the same location depending on the time of the day, weather, season, and more importantly, the prediction is made from a single image possibly having only a few geo-locating cues. For these reasons, most existing works are restricted to specific cities, imagery, or worldwide landmarks. In this work, we focus on developing an efficient solution to planet-scale single-image geo-localization. To this end, we propose TransLocator, a unified dual-branch transformer network that attends to tiny details over the entire image and produces robust feature representation under extreme appearance variations. TransLocator takes an RGB image and its semantic segmentation map as inputs, interacts between its two parallel branches after each transformer layer, and simultaneously performs geo-localization and scene recognition in a multi-task fashion. We evaluate TransLocator on four benchmark datasets - Im2GPS, Im2GPS3k, YFCC4k, YFCC26k and obtain 5.5%, 14.1%, 4.9%, 9.9% continent-level accuracy improvement over the state-of-the-art. TransLocator is also validated on real-world test images and found to be more effective than previous methods.

The Influence of the Other-Race Effect on Susceptibility to Face Morphing Attacks

Facial morphs created between two identities resemble both of the faces used to create the morph. Consequently, humans and machines are prone to mistake morphs made from two identities for either of the faces used to create the morph. This vulnerability has been exploited in "morph attacks" in security scenarios. Here, we asked whether the "other-race effect" (ORE) -- the human advantage for identifying own- vs. other-race faces -- exacerbates morph attack susceptibility for humans. We also asked whether face-identification performance in a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) is affected by the race of morphed faces. Caucasian (CA) and East-Asian (EA) participants performed a face-identity matching task on pairs of CA and EA face images in two conditions. In the morph condition, different-identity pairs consisted of an image of identity "A" and a 50/50 morph between images of identity "A" and "B". In the baseline condition, morphs of different identities never appeared. As expected, morphs were identified mistakenly more often than original face images. Moreover, CA participants showed an advantage for CA faces in comparison to EA faces (a partial ORE). Of primary interest, morph identification was substantially worse for cross-race faces than for own-race faces. Similar to humans, the DCNN performed more accurately for original face images than for morphed image pairs. Notably, the deep network proved substantially more accurate than humans in both cases. The results point to the possibility that DCNNs might be useful for improving face identification accuracy when morphed faces are presented. They also indicate the significance of the ORE in morph attack susceptibility in applied settings.

Distill and De-bias: Mitigating Bias in Face Recognition using Knowledge Distillation

Face recognition networks generally demonstrate bias with respect to sensitive attributes like gender, skintone etc. For gender and skintone, we observe that the regions of the face that a network attends to vary by the category of an attribute. This might contribute to bias. Building on this intuition, we propose a novel distillation-based approach called Distill and De-bias (D&D) to enforce a network to attend to similar face regions, irrespective of the attribute category. In D&D, we train a teacher network on images from one category of an attribute; e.g. light skintone. Then distilling information from the teacher, we train a student network on images of the remaining category; e.g., dark skintone. A feature-level distillation loss constrains the student network to generate teacher-like representations. This allows the student network to attend to similar face regions for all attribute categories and enables it to reduce bias. We also propose a second distillation step on top of D&D, called D&D++. For the D&D++ network, we distill the `un-biasedness' of the D&D network into a new student network, the D&D++ network. We train the new network on all attribute categories; e.g., both light and dark skintones. This helps us train a network that is less biased for an attribute, while obtaining higher face verification performance than D&D. We show that D&D++ outperforms existing baselines in reducing gender and skintone bias on the IJB-C dataset, while obtaining higher face verification performance than existing adversarial de-biasing methods. We evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed methods on two state-of-the-art face recognition networks: Crystalface and ArcFace.

A Synthesis-Based Approach for Thermal-to-Visible Face Verification

In recent years, visible-spectrum face verification systems have been shown to match expert forensic examiner recognition performance. However, such systems are ineffective in low-light and nighttime conditions. Thermal face imagery, which captures body heat emissions, effectively augments the visible spectrum, capturing discriminative facial features in scenes with limited illumination. Due to the increased cost and difficulty of obtaining diverse, paired thermal and visible spectrum datasets, algorithms and large-scale benchmarks for low-light recognition are limited. This paper presents an algorithm that achieves state-of-the-art performance on both the ARL-VTF and TUFTS multi-spectral face datasets. Importantly, we study the impact of face alignment, pixel-level correspondence, and identity classification with label smoothing for multi-spectral face synthesis and verification. We show that our proposed method is widely applicable, robust, and highly effective. In addition, we show that the proposed method significantly outperforms face frontalization methods on profile-to-frontal verification. Finally, we present MILAB-VTF(B), a challenging multi-spectral face dataset that is composed of paired thermal and visible videos. To the best of our knowledge, with face data from 400 subjects, this dataset represents the most extensive collection of publicly available indoor and long-range outdoor thermal-visible face imagery. Lastly, we show that our end-to-end thermal-to-visible face verification system provides strong performance on the MILAB-VTF(B) dataset.

PASS: Protected Attribute Suppression System for Mitigating Bias in Face Recognition

Face recognition networks encode information about sensitive attributes while being trained for identity classification. Such encoding has two major issues: (a) it makes the face representations susceptible to privacy leakage (b) it appears to contribute to bias in face recognition. However, existing bias mitigation approaches generally require end-to-end training and are unable to achieve high verification accuracy. Therefore, we present a descriptor-based adversarial de-biasing approach called `Protected Attribute Suppression System (PASS)'. PASS can be trained on top of descriptors obtained from any previously trained high-performing network to classify identities and simultaneously reduce encoding of sensitive attributes. This eliminates the need for end-to-end training. As a component of PASS, we present a novel discriminator training strategy that discourages a network from encoding protected attribute information. We show the efficacy of PASS to reduce gender and skintone information in descriptors from SOTA face recognition networks like Arcface. As a result, PASS descriptors outperform existing baselines in reducing gender and skintone bias on the IJB-C dataset, while maintaining a high verification accuracy.

An adversarial learning algorithm for mitigating gender bias in face recognition

State-of-the-art face recognition networks implicitly encode gender information while being trained for identity classification. Gender is often viewed as an important face attribute to recognize humans. But, the expression of gender information in deep facial features appears to contribute to gender bias in face recognition, i.e. we find a significant difference in the recognition accuracy of DCNNs on male and female faces. We hypothesize that reducing implicitly encoded gender information will help reduce this gender bias. Therefore, we present a novel approach called `Adversarial Gender De-biasing (AGD)' to reduce the strength of gender information in face recognition features. We accomplish this by introducing a bias reducing classification loss $L_{br}$. We show that AGD significantly reduces bias, while achieving reasonable recognition performance. The results of our approach are presented on two state-of-the-art networks.

Single Unit Status in Deep Convolutional Neural Network Codes for Face Identification: Sparseness Redefined

Deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) trained for face identification develop representations that generalize over variable images, while retaining subject (e.g., gender) and image (e.g., viewpoint) information. Identity, gender, and viewpoint codes were studied at the "neural unit" and ensemble levels of a face-identification network. At the unit level, identification, gender classification, and viewpoint estimation were measured by deleting units to create variably-sized, randomly-sampled subspaces at the top network layer. Identification of 3,531 identities remained high (area under the ROC approximately 1.0) as dimensionality decreased from 512 units to 16 (0.95), 4 (0.80), and 2 (0.72) units. Individual identities separated statistically on every top-layer unit. Cross-unit responses were minimally correlated, indicating that units code non-redundant identity cues. This "distributed" code requires only a sparse, random sample of units to identify faces accurately. Gender classification declined gradually and viewpoint estimation fell steeply as dimensionality decreased. Individual units were weakly predictive of gender and viewpoint, but ensembles proved effective predictors. Therefore, distributed and sparse codes co-exist in the network units to represent different face attributes. At the ensemble level, principal component analysis of face representations showed that identity, gender, and viewpoint information separated into high-dimensional subspaces, ordered by explained variance. Identity, gender, and viewpoint information contributed to all individual unit responses, undercutting a neural tuning analogy for face attributes. Interpretation of neural-like codes from DCNNs, and by analogy, high-level visual codes, cannot be inferred from single unit responses. Instead, "meaning" is encoded by directions in the high-dimensional space.