Titanic Calling: Low Bandwidth Video Conference from the Titanic Wreck

In this paper, we report on communication experiments conducted in the summer of 2022 during a deep dive to the wreck of the Titanic. Radio transmission is not possible in deep sea water, and communication links rely on sonar signals. Due to the low bandwidth of sonar signals and the need to communicate readable data, text messaging is used in deep-sea missions. In this paper, we report results and experiences from a messaging system that converts speech to text in a submarine, sends text messages to the surface, and reconstructs those messages as synthetic lip-synchronous videos of the speakers. The resulting system was tested during an actual dive to Titanic in the summer of 2022. We achieved an acceptable latency for a system of such complexity as well as good quality. The system demonstration video can be found at the following link: https://youtu.be/C4lyM86-5Ig

Audio-Visual Speech Representation Expert for Enhanced Talking Face Video Generation and Evaluation

In the task of talking face generation, the objective is to generate a face video with lips synchronized to the corresponding audio while preserving visual details and identity information. Current methods face the challenge of learning accurate lip synchronization while avoiding detrimental effects on visual quality, as well as robustly evaluating such synchronization. To tackle these problems, we propose utilizing an audio-visual speech representation expert (AV-HuBERT) for calculating lip synchronization loss during training. Moreover, leveraging AV-HuBERT's features, we introduce three novel lip synchronization evaluation metrics, aiming to provide a comprehensive assessment of lip synchronization performance. Experimental results, along with a detailed ablation study, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and the utility of the proposed evaluation metrics.

Plug the Leaks: Advancing Audio-driven Talking Face Generation by Preventing Unintended Information Flow

Audio-driven talking face generation is the task of creating a lip-synchronized, realistic face video from given audio and reference frames. This involves two major challenges: overall visual quality of generated images on the one hand, and audio-visual synchronization of the mouth part on the other hand. In this paper, we start by identifying several problematic aspects of synchronization methods in recent audio-driven talking face generation approaches. Specifically, this involves unintended flow of lip and pose information from the reference to the generated image, as well as instabilities during model training. Subsequently, we propose various techniques for obviating these issues: First, a silent-lip reference image generator prevents leaking of lips from the reference to the generated image. Second, an adaptive triplet loss handles the pose leaking problem. Finally, we propose a stabilized formulation of synchronization loss, circumventing aforementioned training instabilities while additionally further alleviating the lip leaking issue. Combining the individual improvements, we present state-of-the art performance on LRS2 and LRW in both synchronization and visual quality. We further validate our design in various ablation experiments, confirming the individual contributions as well as their complementary effects.

A Survey on Computer Vision based Human Analysis in the COVID-19 Era

The emergence of COVID-19 has had a global and profound impact, not only on society as a whole, but also on the lives of individuals. Various prevention measures were introduced around the world to limit the transmission of the disease, including face masks, mandates for social distancing and regular disinfection in public spaces, and the use of screening applications. These developments also triggered the need for novel and improved computer vision techniques capable of (i) providing support to the prevention measures through an automated analysis of visual data, on the one hand, and (ii) facilitating normal operation of existing vision-based services, such as biometric authentication schemes, on the other. Especially important here, are computer vision techniques that focus on the analysis of people and faces in visual data and have been affected the most by the partial occlusions introduced by the mandates for facial masks. Such computer vision based human analysis techniques include face and face-mask detection approaches, face recognition techniques, crowd counting solutions, age and expression estimation procedures, models for detecting face-hand interactions and many others, and have seen considerable attention over recent years. The goal of this survey is to provide an introduction to the problems induced by COVID-19 into such research and to present a comprehensive review of the work done in the computer vision based human analysis field. Particular attention is paid to the impact of facial masks on the performance of various methods and recent solutions to mitigate this problem. Additionally, a detailed review of existing datasets useful for the development and evaluation of methods for COVID-19 related applications is also provided. Finally, to help advance the field further, a discussion on the main open challenges and future research direction is given.

Face-Dubbing++: Lip-Synchronous, Voice Preserving Translation of Videos

In this paper, we propose a neural end-to-end system for voice preserving, lip-synchronous translation of videos. The system is designed to combine multiple component models and produces a video of the original speaker speaking in the target language that is lip-synchronous with the target speech, yet maintains emphases in speech, voice characteristics, face video of the original speaker. The pipeline starts with automatic speech recognition including emphasis detection, followed by a translation model. The translated text is then synthesized by a Text-to-Speech model that recreates the original emphases mapped from the original sentence. The resulting synthetic voice is then mapped back to the original speakers' voice using a voice conversion model. Finally, to synchronize the lips of the speaker with the translated audio, a conditional generative adversarial network-based model generates frames of adapted lip movements with respect to the input face image as well as the output of the voice conversion model. In the end, the system combines the generated video with the converted audio to produce the final output. The result is a video of a speaker speaking in another language without actually knowing it. To evaluate our design, we present a user study of the complete system as well as separate evaluations of the single components. Since there is no available dataset to evaluate our whole system, we collect a test set and evaluate our system on this test set. The results indicate that our system is able to generate convincing videos of the original speaker speaking the target language while preserving the original speaker's characteristics. The collected dataset will be shared.

Exposure Correction Model to Enhance Image Quality

Exposure errors in an image cause a degradation in the contrast and low visibility in the content. In this paper, we address this problem and propose an end-to-end exposure correction model in order to handle both under- and overexposure errors with a single model. Our model contains an image encoder, consecutive residual blocks, and image decoder to synthesize the corrected image. We utilize perceptual loss, feature matching loss, and multi-scale discriminator to increase the quality of the generated image as well as to make the training more stable. The experimental results indicate the effectiveness of proposed model. We achieve the state-of-the-art result on a large-scale exposure dataset. Besides, we investigate the effect of exposure setting of the image on the portrait matting task. We find that under- and overexposed images cause severe degradation in the performance of the portrait matting models. We show that after applying exposure correction with the proposed model, the portrait matting quality increases significantly. https://github.com/yamand16/ExposureCorrection

A Computer Vision System to Help Prevent the Transmission of COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic affects every area of daily life globally. To avoid the spread of coronavirus and retrieve the daily normal worldwide, health organizations advise social distancing, wearing face mask, and avoiding touching face. Based on these recommended protective measures, we developed a deep learning-based computer vision system to help prevent the transmission of COVID-19. Specifically, the developed system performs face mask detection, face-hand interaction detection, and measures social distance. For these purposes, we collected and annotated images that represent face mask usage and face-hand interaction in the real world. We presented two different face datasets, namely Unconstrained Face Mask Dataset (UFMD) and Unconstrained Face Hand Dataset (UFHD). We trained the proposed models on our own datasets and evaluated them on both our datasets and already existing datasets in the literature without performing any adaptation on these target datasets. Besides, we proposed a distance measurement module to track social distance between people. Experimental results indicate that UFMD and UFHD represent the real-world's diversity well. The proposed system achieved very high performance and generalization capacity in a real-world scenario for unseen data from outside the training data to detect face mask usage and face-hand interaction, and satisfactory performance in the case of tracking social distance. Presented UFMD and UFHD datasets will be available at https://github.com/iremeyiokur/COVID-19-Preventions-Control-System.

Ear2Face: Deep Biometric Modality Mapping

In this paper, we explore the correlation between different visual biometric modalities. For this purpose, we present an end-to-end deep neural network model that learns a mapping between the biometric modalities. Namely, our goal is to generate a frontal face image of a subject given his/her ear image as the input. We formulated the problem as a paired image-to-image translation task and collected datasets of ear and face image pairs from the Multi-PIE and FERET datasets to train our GAN-based models. We employed feature reconstruction and style reconstruction losses in addition to adversarial and pixel losses. We evaluated the proposed method both in terms of reconstruction quality and in terms of person identification accuracy. To assess the generalization capability of the learned mapping models, we also run cross-dataset experiments. That is, we trained the model on the FERET dataset and tested it on the Multi-PIE dataset and vice versa. We have achieved very promising results, especially on the FERET dataset, generating visually appealing face images from ear image inputs. Moreover, we attained a very high cross-modality person identification performance, for example, reaching 90.9% Rank-10 identification accuracy on the FERET dataset.

Multimodal Age and Gender Classification Using Ear and Profile Face Images

In this paper, we present multimodal deep neural network frameworks for age and gender classification, which take input a profile face image as well as an ear image. Our main objective is to enhance the accuracy of soft biometric trait extraction from profile face images by additionally utilizing a promising biometric modality: ear appearance. For this purpose, we provided end-to-end multimodal deep learning frameworks. We explored different multimodal strategies by employing data, feature, and score level fusion. To increase representation and discrimination capability of the deep neural networks, we benefited from domain adaptation and employed center loss besides softmax loss. We conducted extensive experiments on the UND-F, UND-J2, and FERET datasets. Experimental results indicated that profile face images contain a rich source of information for age and gender classification. We found that the presented multimodal system achieves very high age and gender classification accuracies. Moreover, we attained superior results compared to the state-of-the-art profile face image or ear image-based age and gender classification methods.

The Unconstrained Ear Recognition Challenge 2019 - ArXiv Version With Appendix

This paper presents a summary of the 2019 Unconstrained Ear Recognition Challenge (UERC), the second in a series of group benchmarking efforts centered around the problem of person recognition from ear images captured in uncontrolled settings. The goal of the challenge is to assess the performance of existing ear recognition techniques on a challenging large-scale ear dataset and to analyze performance of the technology from various viewpoints, such as generalization abilities to unseen data characteristics, sensitivity to rotations, occlusions and image resolution and performance bias on sub-groups of subjects, selected based on demographic criteria, i.e. gender and ethnicity. Research groups from 12 institutions entered the competition and submitted a total of 13 recognition approaches ranging from descriptor-based methods to deep-learning models. The majority of submissions focused on ensemble based methods combining either representations from multiple deep models or hand-crafted with learned image descriptors. Our analysis shows that methods incorporating deep learning models clearly outperform techniques relying solely on hand-crafted descriptors, even though both groups of techniques exhibit similar behaviour when it comes to robustness to various covariates, such presence of occlusions, changes in (head) pose, or variability in image resolution. The results of the challenge also show that there has been considerable progress since the first UERC in 2017, but that there is still ample room for further research in this area.