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Nov 13

MultiHuman-Testbench: Benchmarking Image Generation for Multiple Humans

Generation of images containing multiple humans, performing complex actions, while preserving their facial identities, is a significant challenge. A major factor contributing to this is the lack of a dedicated benchmark. To address this, we introduce MultiHuman-Testbench, a novel benchmark for rigorously evaluating generative models for multi-human generation. The benchmark comprises 1,800 samples, including carefully curated text prompts, describing a range of simple to complex human actions. These prompts are matched with a total of 5,550 unique human face images, sampled uniformly to ensure diversity across age, ethnic background, and gender. Alongside captions, we provide human-selected pose conditioning images which accurately match the prompt. We propose a multi-faceted evaluation suite employing four key metrics to quantify face count, ID similarity, prompt alignment, and action detection. We conduct a thorough evaluation of a diverse set of models, including zero-shot approaches and training-based methods, with and without regional priors. We also propose novel techniques to incorporate image and region isolation using human segmentation and Hungarian matching, significantly improving ID similarity. Our proposed benchmark and key findings provide valuable insights and a standardized tool for advancing research in multi-human image generation. The dataset and evaluation codes will be available at https://github.com/Qualcomm-AI-research/MultiHuman-Testbench.

  • 9 authors
·
Jun 25

Out-of-domain GAN inversion via Invertibility Decomposition for Photo-Realistic Human Face Manipulation

The fidelity of Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) inversion is impeded by Out-Of-Domain (OOD) areas (e.g., background, accessories) in the image. Detecting the OOD areas beyond the generation ability of the pre-trained model and blending these regions with the input image can enhance fidelity. The "invertibility mask" figures out these OOD areas, and existing methods predict the mask with the reconstruction error. However, the estimated mask is usually inaccurate due to the influence of the reconstruction error in the In-Domain (ID) area. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that enhances the fidelity of human face inversion by designing a new module to decompose the input images to ID and OOD partitions with invertibility masks. Unlike previous works, our invertibility detector is simultaneously learned with a spatial alignment module. We iteratively align the generated features to the input geometry and reduce the reconstruction error in the ID regions. Thus, the OOD areas are more distinguishable and can be precisely predicted. Then, we improve the fidelity of our results by blending the OOD areas from the input image with the ID GAN inversion results. Our method produces photo-realistic results for real-world human face image inversion and manipulation. Extensive experiments demonstrate our method's superiority over existing methods in the quality of GAN inversion and attribute manipulation.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 19, 2022

Generalizable Face Landmarking Guided by Conditional Face Warping

As a significant step for human face modeling, editing, and generation, face landmarking aims at extracting facial keypoints from images. A generalizable face landmarker is required in practice because real-world facial images, e.g., the avatars in animations and games, are often stylized in various ways. However, achieving generalizable face landmarking is challenging due to the diversity of facial styles and the scarcity of labeled stylized faces. In this study, we propose a simple but effective paradigm to learn a generalizable face landmarker based on labeled real human faces and unlabeled stylized faces. Our method learns the face landmarker as the key module of a conditional face warper. Given a pair of real and stylized facial images, the conditional face warper predicts a warping field from the real face to the stylized one, in which the face landmarker predicts the ending points of the warping field and provides us with high-quality pseudo landmarks for the corresponding stylized facial images. Applying an alternating optimization strategy, we learn the face landmarker to minimize i) the discrepancy between the stylized faces and the warped real ones and ii) the prediction errors of both real and pseudo landmarks. Experiments on various datasets show that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods in face landmarking tasks, leading to a face landmarker with better generalizability. Code is available at https://plustwo0.github.io/project-face-landmarker}{https://plustwo0.github.io/project-face-landmarker.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 18, 2024

MoLE: Enhancing Human-centric Text-to-image Diffusion via Mixture of Low-rank Experts

Text-to-image diffusion has attracted vast attention due to its impressive image-generation capabilities. However, when it comes to human-centric text-to-image generation, particularly in the context of faces and hands, the results often fall short of naturalness due to insufficient training priors. We alleviate the issue in this work from two perspectives. 1) From the data aspect, we carefully collect a human-centric dataset comprising over one million high-quality human-in-the-scene images and two specific sets of close-up images of faces and hands. These datasets collectively provide a rich prior knowledge base to enhance the human-centric image generation capabilities of the diffusion model. 2) On the methodological front, we propose a simple yet effective method called Mixture of Low-rank Experts (MoLE) by considering low-rank modules trained on close-up hand and face images respectively as experts. This concept draws inspiration from our observation of low-rank refinement, where a low-rank module trained by a customized close-up dataset has the potential to enhance the corresponding image part when applied at an appropriate scale. To validate the superiority of MoLE in the context of human-centric image generation compared to state-of-the-art, we construct two benchmarks and perform evaluations with diverse metrics and human studies. Datasets, model, and code are released at https://sites.google.com/view/mole4diffuser/.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 30, 2024

Social perception of faces in a vision-language model

We explore social perception of human faces in CLIP, a widely used open-source vision-language model. To this end, we compare the similarity in CLIP embeddings between different textual prompts and a set of face images. Our textual prompts are constructed from well-validated social psychology terms denoting social perception. The face images are synthetic and are systematically and independently varied along six dimensions: the legally protected attributes of age, gender, and race, as well as facial expression, lighting, and pose. Independently and systematically manipulating face attributes allows us to study the effect of each on social perception and avoids confounds that can occur in wild-collected data due to uncontrolled systematic correlations between attributes. Thus, our findings are experimental rather than observational. Our main findings are three. First, while CLIP is trained on the widest variety of images and texts, it is able to make fine-grained human-like social judgments on face images. Second, age, gender, and race do systematically impact CLIP's social perception of faces, suggesting an undesirable bias in CLIP vis-a-vis legally protected attributes. Most strikingly, we find a strong pattern of bias concerning the faces of Black women, where CLIP produces extreme values of social perception across different ages and facial expressions. Third, facial expression impacts social perception more than age and lighting as much as age. The last finding predicts that studies that do not control for unprotected visual attributes may reach the wrong conclusions on bias. Our novel method of investigation, which is founded on the social psychology literature and on the experiments involving the manipulation of individual attributes, yields sharper and more reliable observations than previous observational methods and may be applied to study biases in any vision-language model.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 26, 2024

AvatarBooth: High-Quality and Customizable 3D Human Avatar Generation

We introduce AvatarBooth, a novel method for generating high-quality 3D avatars using text prompts or specific images. Unlike previous approaches that can only synthesize avatars based on simple text descriptions, our method enables the creation of personalized avatars from casually captured face or body images, while still supporting text-based model generation and editing. Our key contribution is the precise avatar generation control by using dual fine-tuned diffusion models separately for the human face and body. This enables us to capture intricate details of facial appearance, clothing, and accessories, resulting in highly realistic avatar generations. Furthermore, we introduce pose-consistent constraint to the optimization process to enhance the multi-view consistency of synthesized head images from the diffusion model and thus eliminate interference from uncontrolled human poses. In addition, we present a multi-resolution rendering strategy that facilitates coarse-to-fine supervision of 3D avatar generation, thereby enhancing the performance of the proposed system. The resulting avatar model can be further edited using additional text descriptions and driven by motion sequences. Experiments show that AvatarBooth outperforms previous text-to-3D methods in terms of rendering and geometric quality from either text prompts or specific images. Please check our project website at https://zeng-yifei.github.io/avatarbooth_page/.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 16, 2023 1

Comparing Human and Machine Bias in Face Recognition

Much recent research has uncovered and discussed serious concerns of bias in facial analysis technologies, finding performance disparities between groups of people based on perceived gender, skin type, lighting condition, etc. These audits are immensely important and successful at measuring algorithmic bias but have two major challenges: the audits (1) use facial recognition datasets which lack quality metadata, like LFW and CelebA, and (2) do not compare their observed algorithmic bias to the biases of their human alternatives. In this paper, we release improvements to the LFW and CelebA datasets which will enable future researchers to obtain measurements of algorithmic bias that are not tainted by major flaws in the dataset (e.g. identical images appearing in both the gallery and test set). We also use these new data to develop a series of challenging facial identification and verification questions that we administered to various algorithms and a large, balanced sample of human reviewers. We find that both computer models and human survey participants perform significantly better at the verification task, generally obtain lower accuracy rates on dark-skinned or female subjects for both tasks, and obtain higher accuracy rates when their demographics match that of the question. Computer models are observed to achieve a higher level of accuracy than the survey participants on both tasks and exhibit bias to similar degrees as the human survey participants.

  • 13 authors
·
Oct 15, 2021

As Good As A Coin Toss: Human detection of AI-generated images, videos, audio, and audiovisual stimuli

As synthetic media becomes progressively more realistic and barriers to using it continue to lower, the technology has been increasingly utilized for malicious purposes, from financial fraud to nonconsensual pornography. Today, the principal defense against being misled by synthetic media relies on the ability of the human observer to visually and auditorily discern between real and fake. However, it remains unclear just how vulnerable people actually are to deceptive synthetic media in the course of their day to day lives. We conducted a perceptual study with 1276 participants to assess how accurate people were at distinguishing synthetic images, audio only, video only, and audiovisual stimuli from authentic. To reflect the circumstances under which people would likely encounter synthetic media in the wild, testing conditions and stimuli emulated a typical online platform, while all synthetic media used in the survey was sourced from publicly accessible generative AI technology. We find that overall, participants struggled to meaningfully discern between synthetic and authentic content. We also find that detection performance worsens when the stimuli contains synthetic content as compared to authentic content, images featuring human faces as compared to non face objects, a single modality as compared to multimodal stimuli, mixed authenticity as compared to being fully synthetic for audiovisual stimuli, and features foreign languages as compared to languages the observer is fluent in. Finally, we also find that prior knowledge of synthetic media does not meaningfully impact their detection performance. Collectively, these results indicate that people are highly susceptible to being tricked by synthetic media in their daily lives and that human perceptual detection capabilities can no longer be relied upon as an effective counterdefense.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 25, 2024

Arc2Face: A Foundation Model of Human Faces

This paper presents Arc2Face, an identity-conditioned face foundation model, which, given the ArcFace embedding of a person, can generate diverse photo-realistic images with an unparalleled degree of face similarity than existing models. Despite previous attempts to decode face recognition features into detailed images, we find that common high-resolution datasets (e.g. FFHQ) lack sufficient identities to reconstruct any subject. To that end, we meticulously upsample a significant portion of the WebFace42M database, the largest public dataset for face recognition (FR). Arc2Face builds upon a pretrained Stable Diffusion model, yet adapts it to the task of ID-to-face generation, conditioned solely on ID vectors. Deviating from recent works that combine ID with text embeddings for zero-shot personalization of text-to-image models, we emphasize on the compactness of FR features, which can fully capture the essence of the human face, as opposed to hand-crafted prompts. Crucially, text-augmented models struggle to decouple identity and text, usually necessitating some description of the given face to achieve satisfactory similarity. Arc2Face, however, only needs the discriminative features of ArcFace to guide the generation, offering a robust prior for a plethora of tasks where ID consistency is of paramount importance. As an example, we train a FR model on synthetic images from our model and achieve superior performance to existing synthetic datasets.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 18, 2024

ZoomEye: Enhancing Multimodal LLMs with Human-Like Zooming Capabilities through Tree-Based Image Exploration

An image, especially with high-resolution, typically consists of numerous visual elements, ranging from dominant large objects to fine-grained detailed objects. When perceiving such images, multimodal large language models~(MLLMs) face limitations due to the restricted input resolution of the pretrained vision encoder and the cluttered, dense context of the image, resulting in a focus on primary objects while easily overlooking detailed ones. In this paper, we propose Zoom Eye, a tree search algorithm designed to navigate the hierarchical and visual nature of images to capture relevant information. Zoom Eye conceptualizes an image as a tree, with each children node representing a zoomed sub-patch of the parent node and the root represents the overall image. Moreover, Zoom Eye is model-agnostic and training-free, so it enables any MLLMs to simulate human zooming actions by searching along the image tree from root to leaf nodes, seeking out pertinent information, and accurately responding to related queries. We experiment on a series of elaborate high-resolution benchmarks and the results demonstrate that Zoom Eye not only consistently improves the performance of a series base MLLMs with large margin~(e.g., LLaVA-v1.5-7B increases by 34.57\% on V^* Bench and 17.88\% on HR-Bench), but also enables small 7B MLLMs to outperform strong large models such as GPT-4o. Our code is available at https://github.com/om-ai-lab/ZoomEye{https://github.com/om-ai-lab/ZoomEye}.

  • 7 authors
·
Nov 24, 2024

GeneMAN: Generalizable Single-Image 3D Human Reconstruction from Multi-Source Human Data

Given a single in-the-wild human photo, it remains a challenging task to reconstruct a high-fidelity 3D human model. Existing methods face difficulties including a) the varying body proportions captured by in-the-wild human images; b) diverse personal belongings within the shot; and c) ambiguities in human postures and inconsistency in human textures. In addition, the scarcity of high-quality human data intensifies the challenge. To address these problems, we propose a Generalizable image-to-3D huMAN reconstruction framework, dubbed GeneMAN, building upon a comprehensive multi-source collection of high-quality human data, including 3D scans, multi-view videos, single photos, and our generated synthetic human data. GeneMAN encompasses three key modules. 1) Without relying on parametric human models (e.g., SMPL), GeneMAN first trains a human-specific text-to-image diffusion model and a view-conditioned diffusion model, serving as GeneMAN 2D human prior and 3D human prior for reconstruction, respectively. 2) With the help of the pretrained human prior models, the Geometry Initialization-&-Sculpting pipeline is leveraged to recover high-quality 3D human geometry given a single image. 3) To achieve high-fidelity 3D human textures, GeneMAN employs the Multi-Space Texture Refinement pipeline, consecutively refining textures in the latent and the pixel spaces. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that GeneMAN could generate high-quality 3D human models from a single image input, outperforming prior state-of-the-art methods. Notably, GeneMAN could reveal much better generalizability in dealing with in-the-wild images, often yielding high-quality 3D human models in natural poses with common items, regardless of the body proportions in the input images.

  • 8 authors
·
Nov 27, 2024

Face Detection in the Operating Room: Comparison of State-of-the-art Methods and a Self-supervised Approach

Purpose: Face detection is a needed component for the automatic analysis and assistance of human activities during surgical procedures. Efficient face detection algorithms can indeed help to detect and identify the persons present in the room, and also be used to automatically anonymize the data. However, current algorithms trained on natural images do not generalize well to the operating room (OR) images. In this work, we provide a comparison of state-of-the-art face detectors on OR data and also present an approach to train a face detector for the OR by exploiting non-annotated OR images. Methods: We propose a comparison of 6 state-of-the-art face detectors on clinical data using Multi-View Operating Room Faces (MVOR-Faces), a dataset of operating room images capturing real surgical activities. We then propose to use self-supervision, a domain adaptation method, for the task of face detection in the OR. The approach makes use of non-annotated images to fine-tune a state-of-the-art detector for the OR without using any human supervision. Results: The results show that the best model, namely the tiny face detector, yields an average precision of 0.536 at Intersection over Union (IoU) of 0.5. Our self-supervised model using non-annotated clinical data outperforms this result by 9.2%. Conclusion: We present the first comparison of state-of-the-art face detectors on operating room images and show that results can be significantly improved by using self-supervision on non-annotated data.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 29, 2018

Zolly: Zoom Focal Length Correctly for Perspective-Distorted Human Mesh Reconstruction

As it is hard to calibrate single-view RGB images in the wild, existing 3D human mesh reconstruction (3DHMR) methods either use a constant large focal length or estimate one based on the background environment context, which can not tackle the problem of the torso, limb, hand or face distortion caused by perspective camera projection when the camera is close to the human body. The naive focal length assumptions can harm this task with the incorrectly formulated projection matrices. To solve this, we propose Zolly, the first 3DHMR method focusing on perspective-distorted images. Our approach begins with analysing the reason for perspective distortion, which we find is mainly caused by the relative location of the human body to the camera center. We propose a new camera model and a novel 2D representation, termed distortion image, which describes the 2D dense distortion scale of the human body. We then estimate the distance from distortion scale features rather than environment context features. Afterwards, we integrate the distortion feature with image features to reconstruct the body mesh. To formulate the correct projection matrix and locate the human body position, we simultaneously use perspective and weak-perspective projection loss. Since existing datasets could not handle this task, we propose the first synthetic dataset PDHuman and extend two real-world datasets tailored for this task, all containing perspective-distorted human images. Extensive experiments show that Zolly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on both perspective-distorted datasets and the standard benchmark (3DPW).

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 24, 2023

DreamSalon: A Staged Diffusion Framework for Preserving Identity-Context in Editable Face Generation

While large-scale pre-trained text-to-image models can synthesize diverse and high-quality human-centered images, novel challenges arise with a nuanced task of "identity fine editing": precisely modifying specific features of a subject while maintaining its inherent identity and context. Existing personalization methods either require time-consuming optimization or learning additional encoders, adept in "identity re-contextualization". However, they often struggle with detailed and sensitive tasks like human face editing. To address these challenges, we introduce DreamSalon, a noise-guided, staged-editing framework, uniquely focusing on detailed image manipulations and identity-context preservation. By discerning editing and boosting stages via the frequency and gradient of predicted noises, DreamSalon first performs detailed manipulations on specific features in the editing stage, guided by high-frequency information, and then employs stochastic denoising in the boosting stage to improve image quality. For more precise editing, DreamSalon semantically mixes source and target textual prompts, guided by differences in their embedding covariances, to direct the model's focus on specific manipulation areas. Our experiments demonstrate DreamSalon's ability to efficiently and faithfully edit fine details on human faces, outperforming existing methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 28, 2024

ID-Animator: Zero-Shot Identity-Preserving Human Video Generation

Generating high fidelity human video with specified identities has attracted significant attention in the content generation community. However, existing techniques struggle to strike a balance between training efficiency and identity preservation, either requiring tedious case-by-case finetuning or usually missing the identity details in video generation process. In this study, we present ID-Animator, a zero-shot human-video generation approach that can perform personalized video generation given single reference facial image without further training. ID-Animator inherits existing diffusion-based video generation backbones with a face adapter to encode the ID-relevant embeddings from learnable facial latent queries. To facilitate the extraction of identity information in video generation, we introduce an ID-oriented dataset construction pipeline, which incorporates decoupled human attribute and action captioning technique from a constructed facial image pool. Based on this pipeline, a random face reference training method is further devised to precisely capture the ID-relevant embeddings from reference images, thus improving the fidelity and generalization capacity of our model for ID-specific video generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of ID-Animator to generate personalized human videos over previous models. Moreover, our method is highly compatible with popular pre-trained T2V models like animatediff and various community backbone models, showing high extendability in real-world applications for video generation where identity preservation is highly desired. Our codes and checkpoints will be released at https://github.com/ID-Animator/ID-Animator.

  • 9 authors
·
Apr 23, 2024

FaceChain: A Playground for Human-centric Artificial Intelligence Generated Content

Recent advancement in personalized image generation have unveiled the intriguing capability of pre-trained text-to-image models on learning identity information from a collection of portrait images. However, existing solutions are vulnerable in producing truthful details, and usually suffer from several defects such as (i) The generated face exhibit its own unique characteristics, \ie facial shape and facial feature positioning may not resemble key characteristics of the input, and (ii) The synthesized face may contain warped, blurred or corrupted regions. In this paper, we present FaceChain, a personalized portrait generation framework that combines a series of customized image-generation model and a rich set of face-related perceptual understanding models (\eg, face detection, deep face embedding extraction, and facial attribute recognition), to tackle aforementioned challenges and to generate truthful personalized portraits, with only a handful of portrait images as input. Concretely, we inject several SOTA face models into the generation procedure, achieving a more efficient label-tagging, data-processing, and model post-processing compared to previous solutions, such as DreamBooth ~ruiz2023dreambooth , InstantBooth ~shi2023instantbooth , or other LoRA-only approaches ~hu2021lora . Besides, based on FaceChain, we further develop several applications to build a broader playground for better showing its value, including virtual try on and 2D talking head. We hope it can grow to serve the burgeoning needs from the communities. Note that this is an ongoing work that will be consistently refined and improved upon. FaceChain is open-sourced under Apache-2.0 license at https://github.com/modelscope/facechain.

  • 20 authors
·
Aug 27, 2023

ChatAnything: Facetime Chat with LLM-Enhanced Personas

In this technical report, we target generating anthropomorphized personas for LLM-based characters in an online manner, including visual appearance, personality and tones, with only text descriptions. To achieve this, we first leverage the in-context learning capability of LLMs for personality generation by carefully designing a set of system prompts. We then propose two novel concepts: the mixture of voices (MoV) and the mixture of diffusers (MoD) for diverse voice and appearance generation. For MoV, we utilize the text-to-speech (TTS) algorithms with a variety of pre-defined tones and select the most matching one based on the user-provided text description automatically. For MoD, we combine the recent popular text-to-image generation techniques and talking head algorithms to streamline the process of generating talking objects. We termed the whole framework as ChatAnything. With it, users could be able to animate anything with any personas that are anthropomorphic using just a few text inputs. However, we have observed that the anthropomorphic objects produced by current generative models are often undetectable by pre-trained face landmark detectors, leading to failure of the face motion generation, even if these faces possess human-like appearances because those images are nearly seen during the training (e.g., OOD samples). To address this issue, we incorporate pixel-level guidance to infuse human face landmarks during the image generation phase. To benchmark these metrics, we have built an evaluation dataset. Based on it, we verify that the detection rate of the face landmark is significantly increased from 57.0% to 92.5% thus allowing automatic face animation based on generated speech content. The code and more results can be found at https://chatanything.github.io/.

  • 7 authors
·
Nov 12, 2023 3

FaceID-6M: A Large-Scale, Open-Source FaceID Customization Dataset

Due to the data-driven nature of current face identity (FaceID) customization methods, all state-of-the-art models rely on large-scale datasets containing millions of high-quality text-image pairs for training. However, none of these datasets are publicly available, which restricts transparency and hinders further advancements in the field. To address this issue, in this paper, we collect and release FaceID-6M, the first large-scale, open-source FaceID dataset containing 6 million high-quality text-image pairs. Filtered from LAION-5B schuhmann2022laion, FaceID-6M undergoes a rigorous image and text filtering steps to ensure dataset quality, including resolution filtering to maintain high-quality images and faces, face filtering to remove images that lack human faces, and keyword-based strategy to retain descriptions containing human-related terms (e.g., nationality, professions and names). Through these cleaning processes, FaceID-6M provides a high-quality dataset optimized for training powerful FaceID customization models, facilitating advancements in the field by offering an open resource for research and development. We conduct extensive experiments to show the effectiveness of our FaceID-6M, demonstrating that models trained on our FaceID-6M dataset achieve performance that is comparable to, and slightly better than currently available industrial models. Additionally, to support and advance research in the FaceID customization community, we make our code, datasets, and models fully publicly available. Our codes, models, and datasets are available at: https://github.com/ShuheSH/FaceID-6M.

  • 11 authors
·
Mar 10

FaceVid-1K: A Large-Scale High-Quality Multiracial Human Face Video Dataset

Generating talking face videos from various conditions has recently become a highly popular research area within generative tasks. However, building a high-quality face video generation model requires a well-performing pre-trained backbone, a key obstacle that universal models fail to adequately address. Most existing works rely on universal video or image generation models and optimize control mechanisms, but they neglect the evident upper bound in video quality due to the limited capabilities of the backbones, which is a result of the lack of high-quality human face video datasets. In this work, we investigate the unsatisfactory results from related studies, gather and trim existing public talking face video datasets, and additionally collect and annotate a large-scale dataset, resulting in a comprehensive, high-quality multiracial face collection named FaceVid-1K. Using this dataset, we craft several effective pre-trained backbone models for face video generation. Specifically, we conduct experiments with several well-established video generation models, including text-to-video, image-to-video, and unconditional video generation, under various settings. We obtain the corresponding performance benchmarks and compared them with those trained on public datasets to demonstrate the superiority of our dataset. These experiments also allow us to investigate empirical strategies for crafting domain-specific video generation tasks with cost-effective settings. We will make our curated dataset, along with the pre-trained talking face video generation models, publicly available as a resource contribution to hopefully advance the research field.

  • 9 authors
·
Sep 23, 2024

Benchmarking Algorithmic Bias in Face Recognition: An Experimental Approach Using Synthetic Faces and Human Evaluation

We propose an experimental method for measuring bias in face recognition systems. Existing methods to measure bias depend on benchmark datasets that are collected in the wild and annotated for protected (e.g., race, gender) and non-protected (e.g., pose, lighting) attributes. Such observational datasets only permit correlational conclusions, e.g., "Algorithm A's accuracy is different on female and male faces in dataset X.". By contrast, experimental methods manipulate attributes individually and thus permit causal conclusions, e.g., "Algorithm A's accuracy is affected by gender and skin color." Our method is based on generating synthetic faces using a neural face generator, where each attribute of interest is modified independently while leaving all other attributes constant. Human observers crucially provide the ground truth on perceptual identity similarity between synthetic image pairs. We validate our method quantitatively by evaluating race and gender biases of three research-grade face recognition models. Our synthetic pipeline reveals that for these algorithms, accuracy is lower for Black and East Asian population subgroups. Our method can also quantify how perceptual changes in attributes affect face identity distances reported by these models. Our large synthetic dataset, consisting of 48,000 synthetic face image pairs (10,200 unique synthetic faces) and 555,000 human annotations (individual attributes and pairwise identity comparisons) is available to researchers in this important area.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 10, 2023

InstructPix2NeRF: Instructed 3D Portrait Editing from a Single Image

With the success of Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) in 3D-aware portrait editing, a variety of works have achieved promising results regarding both quality and 3D consistency. However, these methods heavily rely on per-prompt optimization when handling natural language as editing instructions. Due to the lack of labeled human face 3D datasets and effective architectures, the area of human-instructed 3D-aware editing for open-world portraits in an end-to-end manner remains under-explored. To solve this problem, we propose an end-to-end diffusion-based framework termed InstructPix2NeRF, which enables instructed 3D-aware portrait editing from a single open-world image with human instructions. At its core lies a conditional latent 3D diffusion process that lifts 2D editing to 3D space by learning the correlation between the paired images' difference and the instructions via triplet data. With the help of our proposed token position randomization strategy, we could even achieve multi-semantic editing through one single pass with the portrait identity well-preserved. Besides, we further propose an identity consistency module that directly modulates the extracted identity signals into our diffusion process, which increases the multi-view 3D identity consistency. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of our method and show its superiority against strong baselines quantitatively and qualitatively. Source code and pre-trained models can be found on our project page: https://mybabyyh.github.io/InstructPix2NeRF.

  • 8 authors
·
Nov 5, 2023 1

When StyleGAN Meets Stable Diffusion: a $\mathscr{W}_+$ Adapter for Personalized Image Generation

Text-to-image diffusion models have remarkably excelled in producing diverse, high-quality, and photo-realistic images. This advancement has spurred a growing interest in incorporating specific identities into generated content. Most current methods employ an inversion approach to embed a target visual concept into the text embedding space using a single reference image. However, the newly synthesized faces either closely resemble the reference image in terms of facial attributes, such as expression, or exhibit a reduced capacity for identity preservation. Text descriptions intended to guide the facial attributes of the synthesized face may fall short, owing to the intricate entanglement of identity information with identity-irrelevant facial attributes derived from the reference image. To address these issues, we present the novel use of the extended StyleGAN embedding space W_+, to achieve enhanced identity preservation and disentanglement for diffusion models. By aligning this semantically meaningful human face latent space with text-to-image diffusion models, we succeed in maintaining high fidelity in identity preservation, coupled with the capacity for semantic editing. Additionally, we propose new training objectives to balance the influences of both prompt and identity conditions, ensuring that the identity-irrelevant background remains unaffected during facial attribute modifications. Extensive experiments reveal that our method adeptly generates personalized text-to-image outputs that are not only compatible with prompt descriptions but also amenable to common StyleGAN editing directions in diverse settings. Our source code will be available at https://github.com/csxmli2016/w-plus-adapter.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 29, 2023

AdaptiveDrag: Semantic-Driven Dragging on Diffusion-Based Image Editing

Recently, several point-based image editing methods (e.g., DragDiffusion, FreeDrag, DragNoise) have emerged, yielding precise and high-quality results based on user instructions. However, these methods often make insufficient use of semantic information, leading to less desirable results. In this paper, we proposed a novel mask-free point-based image editing method, AdaptiveDrag, which provides a more flexible editing approach and generates images that better align with user intent. Specifically, we design an auto mask generation module using super-pixel division for user-friendliness. Next, we leverage a pre-trained diffusion model to optimize the latent, enabling the dragging of features from handle points to target points. To ensure a comprehensive connection between the input image and the drag process, we have developed a semantic-driven optimization. We design adaptive steps that are supervised by the positions of the points and the semantic regions derived from super-pixel segmentation. This refined optimization process also leads to more realistic and accurate drag results. Furthermore, to address the limitations in the generative consistency of the diffusion model, we introduce an innovative corresponding loss during the sampling process. Building on these effective designs, our method delivers superior generation results using only the single input image and the handle-target point pairs. Extensive experiments have been conducted and demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms others in handling various drag instructions (e.g., resize, movement, extension) across different domains (e.g., animals, human face, land space, clothing).

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 16, 2024

Implicit Identity Representation Conditioned Memory Compensation Network for Talking Head video Generation

Talking head video generation aims to animate a human face in a still image with dynamic poses and expressions using motion information derived from a target-driving video, while maintaining the person's identity in the source image. However, dramatic and complex motions in the driving video cause ambiguous generation, because the still source image cannot provide sufficient appearance information for occluded regions or delicate expression variations, which produces severe artifacts and significantly degrades the generation quality. To tackle this problem, we propose to learn a global facial representation space, and design a novel implicit identity representation conditioned memory compensation network, coined as MCNet, for high-fidelity talking head generation.~Specifically, we devise a network module to learn a unified spatial facial meta-memory bank from all training samples, which can provide rich facial structure and appearance priors to compensate warped source facial features for the generation. Furthermore, we propose an effective query mechanism based on implicit identity representations learned from the discrete keypoints of the source image. It can greatly facilitate the retrieval of more correlated information from the memory bank for the compensation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MCNet can learn representative and complementary facial memory, and can clearly outperform previous state-of-the-art talking head generation methods on VoxCeleb1 and CelebV datasets. Please check our https://github.com/harlanhong/ICCV2023-MCNET{Project}.

  • 2 authors
·
Jul 19, 2023 1

Depth-Aware Generative Adversarial Network for Talking Head Video Generation

Talking head video generation aims to produce a synthetic human face video that contains the identity and pose information respectively from a given source image and a driving video.Existing works for this task heavily rely on 2D representations (e.g. appearance and motion) learned from the input images. However, dense 3D facial geometry (e.g. pixel-wise depth) is extremely important for this task as it is particularly beneficial for us to essentially generate accurate 3D face structures and distinguish noisy information from the possibly cluttered background. Nevertheless, dense 3D geometry annotations are prohibitively costly for videos and are typically not available for this video generation task. In this paper, we first introduce a self-supervised geometry learning method to automatically recover the dense 3D geometry (i.e.depth) from the face videos without the requirement of any expensive 3D annotation data. Based on the learned dense depth maps, we further propose to leverage them to estimate sparse facial keypoints that capture the critical movement of the human head. In a more dense way, the depth is also utilized to learn 3D-aware cross-modal (i.e. appearance and depth) attention to guide the generation of motion fields for warping source image representations. All these contributions compose a novel depth-aware generative adversarial network (DaGAN) for talking head generation. Extensive experiments conducted demonstrate that our proposed method can generate highly realistic faces, and achieve significant results on the unseen human faces.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 13, 2022

Vec2Face: Scaling Face Dataset Generation with Loosely Constrained Vectors

This paper studies how to synthesize face images of non-existent persons, to create a dataset that allows effective training of face recognition (FR) models. Two important goals are (1) the ability to generate a large number of distinct identities (inter-class separation) with (2) a wide variation in appearance of each identity (intra-class variation). However, existing works 1) are typically limited in how many well-separated identities can be generated and 2) either neglect or use a separate editing model for attribute augmentation. We propose Vec2Face, a holistic model that uses only a sampled vector as input and can flexibly generate and control face images and their attributes. Composed of a feature masked autoencoder and a decoder, Vec2Face is supervised by face image reconstruction and can be conveniently used in inference. Using vectors with low similarity among themselves as inputs, Vec2Face generates well-separated identities. Randomly perturbing an input identity vector within a small range allows Vec2Face to generate faces of the same identity with robust variation in face attributes. It is also possible to generate images with designated attributes by adjusting vector values with a gradient descent method. Vec2Face has efficiently synthesized as many as 300K identities with 15 million total images, whereas 60K is the largest number of identities created in the previous works. FR models trained with the generated HSFace datasets, from 10k to 300k identities, achieve state-of-the-art accuracy, from 92% to 93.52%, on five real-world test sets. For the first time, our model created using a synthetic training set achieves higher accuracy than the model created using a same-scale training set of real face images (on the CALFW test set).

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 4, 2024 1

VirtualModel: Generating Object-ID-retentive Human-object Interaction Image by Diffusion Model for E-commerce Marketing

Due to the significant advances in large-scale text-to-image generation by diffusion model (DM), controllable human image generation has been attracting much attention recently. Existing works, such as Controlnet [36], T2I-adapter [20] and HumanSD [10] have demonstrated good abilities in generating human images based on pose conditions, they still fail to meet the requirements of real e-commerce scenarios. These include (1) the interaction between the shown product and human should be considered, (2) human parts like face/hand/arm/foot and the interaction between human model and product should be hyper-realistic, and (3) the identity of the product shown in advertising should be exactly consistent with the product itself. To this end, in this paper, we first define a new human image generation task for e-commerce marketing, i.e., Object-ID-retentive Human-object Interaction image Generation (OHG), and then propose a VirtualModel framework to generate human images for product shown, which supports displays of any categories of products and any types of human-object interaction. As shown in Figure 1, VirtualModel not only outperforms other methods in terms of accurate pose control and image quality but also allows for the display of user-specified product objects by maintaining the product-ID consistency and enhancing the plausibility of human-object interaction. Codes and data will be released.

  • 5 authors
·
May 16, 2024

HyperHuman: Hyper-Realistic Human Generation with Latent Structural Diffusion

Despite significant advances in large-scale text-to-image models, achieving hyper-realistic human image generation remains a desirable yet unsolved task. Existing models like Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 2 tend to generate human images with incoherent parts or unnatural poses. To tackle these challenges, our key insight is that human image is inherently structural over multiple granularities, from the coarse-level body skeleton to fine-grained spatial geometry. Therefore, capturing such correlations between the explicit appearance and latent structure in one model is essential to generate coherent and natural human images. To this end, we propose a unified framework, HyperHuman, that generates in-the-wild human images of high realism and diverse layouts. Specifically, 1) we first build a large-scale human-centric dataset, named HumanVerse, which consists of 340M images with comprehensive annotations like human pose, depth, and surface normal. 2) Next, we propose a Latent Structural Diffusion Model that simultaneously denoises the depth and surface normal along with the synthesized RGB image. Our model enforces the joint learning of image appearance, spatial relationship, and geometry in a unified network, where each branch in the model complements to each other with both structural awareness and textural richness. 3) Finally, to further boost the visual quality, we propose a Structure-Guided Refiner to compose the predicted conditions for more detailed generation of higher resolution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework yields the state-of-the-art performance, generating hyper-realistic human images under diverse scenarios. Project Page: https://snap-research.github.io/HyperHuman/

  • 9 authors
·
Oct 12, 2023 1

CIFAR10 to Compare Visual Recognition Performance between Deep Neural Networks and Humans

Visual object recognition plays an essential role in human daily life. This ability is so efficient that we can recognize a face or an object seemingly without effort, though they may vary in position, scale, pose, and illumination. In the field of computer vision, a large number of studies have been carried out to build a human-like object recognition system. Recently, deep neural networks have shown impressive progress in object classification performance, and have been reported to surpass humans. Yet there is still lack of thorough and fair comparison between humans and artificial recognition systems. While some studies consider artificially degraded images, human recognition performance on dataset widely used for deep neural networks has not been fully evaluated. The present paper carries out an extensive experiment to evaluate human classification accuracy on CIFAR10, a well-known dataset of natural images. This then allows for a fair comparison with the state-of-the-art deep neural networks. Our CIFAR10-based evaluations show very efficient object recognition of recent CNNs but, at the same time, prove that they are still far from human-level capability of generalization. Moreover, a detailed investigation using multiple levels of difficulty reveals that easy images for humans may not be easy for deep neural networks. Such images form a subset of CIFAR10 that can be employed to evaluate and improve future neural networks.

  • 1 authors
·
Nov 17, 2018

Exploring Vision Language Models for Facial Attribute Recognition: Emotion, Race, Gender, and Age

Technologies for recognizing facial attributes like race, gender, age, and emotion have several applications, such as surveillance, advertising content, sentiment analysis, and the study of demographic trends and social behaviors. Analyzing demographic characteristics based on images and analyzing facial expressions have several challenges due to the complexity of humans' facial attributes. Traditional approaches have employed CNNs and various other deep learning techniques, trained on extensive collections of labeled images. While these methods demonstrated effective performance, there remains potential for further enhancements. In this paper, we propose to utilize vision language models (VLMs) such as generative pre-trained transformer (GPT), GEMINI, large language and vision assistant (LLAVA), PaliGemma, and Microsoft Florence2 to recognize facial attributes such as race, gender, age, and emotion from images with human faces. Various datasets like FairFace, AffectNet, and UTKFace have been utilized to evaluate the solutions. The results show that VLMs are competitive if not superior to traditional techniques. Additionally, we propose "FaceScanPaliGemma"--a fine-tuned PaliGemma model--for race, gender, age, and emotion recognition. The results show an accuracy of 81.1%, 95.8%, 80%, and 59.4% for race, gender, age group, and emotion classification, respectively, outperforming pre-trained version of PaliGemma, other VLMs, and SotA methods. Finally, we propose "FaceScanGPT", which is a GPT-4o model to recognize the above attributes when several individuals are present in the image using a prompt engineered for a person with specific facial and/or physical attributes. The results underscore the superior multitasking capability of FaceScanGPT to detect the individual's attributes like hair cut, clothing color, postures, etc., using only a prompt to drive the detection and recognition tasks.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 31, 2024

FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering

Despite significant recent advances in the field of face recognition, implementing face verification and recognition efficiently at scale presents serious challenges to current approaches. In this paper we present a system, called FaceNet, that directly learns a mapping from face images to a compact Euclidean space where distances directly correspond to a measure of face similarity. Once this space has been produced, tasks such as face recognition, verification and clustering can be easily implemented using standard techniques with FaceNet embeddings as feature vectors. Our method uses a deep convolutional network trained to directly optimize the embedding itself, rather than an intermediate bottleneck layer as in previous deep learning approaches. To train, we use triplets of roughly aligned matching / non-matching face patches generated using a novel online triplet mining method. The benefit of our approach is much greater representational efficiency: we achieve state-of-the-art face recognition performance using only 128-bytes per face. On the widely used Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) dataset, our system achieves a new record accuracy of 99.63%. On YouTube Faces DB it achieves 95.12%. Our system cuts the error rate in comparison to the best published result by 30% on both datasets. We also introduce the concept of harmonic embeddings, and a harmonic triplet loss, which describe different versions of face embeddings (produced by different networks) that are compatible to each other and allow for direct comparison between each other.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 12, 2015

ANIM: Accurate Neural Implicit Model for Human Reconstruction from a single RGB-D image

Recent progress in human shape learning, shows that neural implicit models are effective in generating 3D human surfaces from limited number of views, and even from a single RGB image. However, existing monocular approaches still struggle to recover fine geometric details such as face, hands or cloth wrinkles. They are also easily prone to depth ambiguities that result in distorted geometries along the camera optical axis. In this paper, we explore the benefits of incorporating depth observations in the reconstruction process by introducing ANIM, a novel method that reconstructs arbitrary 3D human shapes from single-view RGB-D images with an unprecedented level of accuracy. Our model learns geometric details from both multi-resolution pixel-aligned and voxel-aligned features to leverage depth information and enable spatial relationships, mitigating depth ambiguities. We further enhance the quality of the reconstructed shape by introducing a depth-supervision strategy, which improves the accuracy of the signed distance field estimation of points that lie on the reconstructed surface. Experiments demonstrate that ANIM outperforms state-of-the-art works that use RGB, surface normals, point cloud or RGB-D data as input. In addition, we introduce ANIM-Real, a new multi-modal dataset comprising high-quality scans paired with consumer-grade RGB-D camera, and our protocol to fine-tune ANIM, enabling high-quality reconstruction from real-world human capture.

  • 10 authors
·
Mar 15, 2024

What Makes a Face Look like a Hat: Decoupling Low-level and High-level Visual Properties with Image Triplets

In visual decision making, high-level features, such as object categories, have a strong influence on choice. However, the impact of low-level features on behavior is less understood partly due to the high correlation between high- and low-level features in the stimuli presented (e.g., objects of the same category are more likely to share low-level features). To disentangle these effects, we propose a method that de-correlates low- and high-level visual properties in a novel set of stimuli. Our method uses two Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) as candidate models of the ventral visual stream: the CORnet-S that has high neural predictivity in high-level, IT-like responses and the VGG-16 that has high neural predictivity in low-level responses. Triplets (root, image1, image2) of stimuli are parametrized by the level of low- and high-level similarity of images extracted from the different layers. These stimuli are then used in a decision-making task where participants are tasked to choose the most similar-to-the-root image. We found that different networks show differing abilities to predict the effects of low-versus-high-level similarity: while CORnet-S outperforms VGG-16 in explaining human choices based on high-level similarity, VGG-16 outperforms CORnet-S in explaining human choices based on low-level similarity. Using Brain-Score, we observed that the behavioral prediction abilities of different layers of these networks qualitatively corresponded to their ability to explain neural activity at different levels of the visual hierarchy. In summary, our algorithm for stimulus set generation enables the study of how different representations in the visual stream affect high-level cognitive behaviors.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 3, 2024

RoI Tanh-polar Transformer Network for Face Parsing in the Wild

Face parsing aims to predict pixel-wise labels for facial components of a target face in an image. Existing approaches usually crop the target face from the input image with respect to a bounding box calculated during pre-processing, and thus can only parse inner facial Regions of Interest~(RoIs). Peripheral regions like hair are ignored and nearby faces that are partially included in the bounding box can cause distractions. Moreover, these methods are only trained and evaluated on near-frontal portrait images and thus their performance for in-the-wild cases has been unexplored. To address these issues, this paper makes three contributions. First, we introduce iBugMask dataset for face parsing in the wild, which consists of 21,866 training images and 1,000 testing images. The training images are obtained by augmenting an existing dataset with large face poses. The testing images are manually annotated with 11 facial regions and there are large variations in sizes, poses, expressions and background. Second, we propose RoI Tanh-polar transform that warps the whole image to a Tanh-polar representation with a fixed ratio between the face area and the context, guided by the target bounding box. The new representation contains all information in the original image, and allows for rotation equivariance in the convolutional neural networks~(CNNs). Third, we propose a hybrid residual representation learning block, coined HybridBlock, that contains convolutional layers in both the Tanh-polar space and the Tanh-Cartesian space, allowing for receptive fields of different shapes in CNNs. Through extensive experiments, we show that the proposed method improves the state-of-the-art for face parsing in the wild and does not require facial landmarks for alignment.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 4, 2021

Towards Metrical Reconstruction of Human Faces

Face reconstruction and tracking is a building block of numerous applications in AR/VR, human-machine interaction, as well as medical applications. Most of these applications rely on a metrically correct prediction of the shape, especially, when the reconstructed subject is put into a metrical context (i.e., when there is a reference object of known size). A metrical reconstruction is also needed for any application that measures distances and dimensions of the subject (e.g., to virtually fit a glasses frame). State-of-the-art methods for face reconstruction from a single image are trained on large 2D image datasets in a self-supervised fashion. However, due to the nature of a perspective projection they are not able to reconstruct the actual face dimensions, and even predicting the average human face outperforms some of these methods in a metrical sense. To learn the actual shape of a face, we argue for a supervised training scheme. Since there exists no large-scale 3D dataset for this task, we annotated and unified small- and medium-scale databases. The resulting unified dataset is still a medium-scale dataset with more than 2k identities and training purely on it would lead to overfitting. To this end, we take advantage of a face recognition network pretrained on a large-scale 2D image dataset, which provides distinct features for different faces and is robust to expression, illumination, and camera changes. Using these features, we train our face shape estimator in a supervised fashion, inheriting the robustness and generalization of the face recognition network. Our method, which we call MICA (MetrIC fAce), outperforms the state-of-the-art reconstruction methods by a large margin, both on current non-metric benchmarks as well as on our metric benchmarks (15% and 24% lower average error on NoW, respectively).

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 13, 2022

3D Human Reconstruction in the Wild with Synthetic Data Using Generative Models

In this work, we show that synthetic data created by generative models is complementary to computer graphics (CG) rendered data for achieving remarkable generalization performance on diverse real-world scenes for 3D human pose and shape estimation (HPS). Specifically, we propose an effective approach based on recent diffusion models, termed HumanWild, which can effortlessly generate human images and corresponding 3D mesh annotations. We first collect a large-scale human-centric dataset with comprehensive annotations, e.g., text captions and surface normal images. Then, we train a customized ControlNet model upon this dataset to generate diverse human images and initial ground-truth labels. At the core of this step is that we can easily obtain numerous surface normal images from a 3D human parametric model, e.g., SMPL-X, by rendering the 3D mesh onto the image plane. As there exists inevitable noise in the initial labels, we then apply an off-the-shelf foundation segmentation model, i.e., SAM, to filter negative data samples. Our data generation pipeline is flexible and customizable to facilitate different real-world tasks, e.g., ego-centric scenes and perspective-distortion scenes. The generated dataset comprises 0.79M images with corresponding 3D annotations, covering versatile viewpoints, scenes, and human identities. We train various HPS regressors on top of the generated data and evaluate them on a wide range of benchmarks (3DPW, RICH, EgoBody, AGORA, SSP-3D) to verify the effectiveness of the generated data. By exclusively employing generative models, we generate large-scale in-the-wild human images and high-quality annotations, eliminating the need for real-world data collection.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 17, 2024

FaceChain-FACT: Face Adapter with Decoupled Training for Identity-preserved Personalization

In the field of human-centric personalized image generation, the adapter-based method obtains the ability to customize and generate portraits by text-to-image training on facial data. This allows for identity-preserved personalization without additional fine-tuning in inference. Although there are improvements in efficiency and fidelity, there is often a significant performance decrease in test following ability, controllability, and diversity of generated faces compared to the base model. In this paper, we analyze that the performance degradation is attributed to the failure to decouple identity features from other attributes during extraction, as well as the failure to decouple the portrait generation training from the overall generation task. To address these issues, we propose the Face Adapter with deCoupled Training (FACT) framework, focusing on both model architecture and training strategy. To decouple identity features from others, we leverage a transformer-based face-export encoder and harness fine-grained identity features. To decouple the portrait generation training, we propose Face Adapting Increment Regularization~(FAIR), which effectively constrains the effect of face adapters on the facial region, preserving the generative ability of the base model. Additionally, we incorporate a face condition drop and shuffle mechanism, combined with curriculum learning, to enhance facial controllability and diversity. As a result, FACT solely learns identity preservation from training data, thereby minimizing the impact on the original text-to-image capabilities of the base model. Extensive experiments show that FACT has both controllability and fidelity in both text-to-image generation and inpainting solutions for portrait generation.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 16, 2024

HumanNorm: Learning Normal Diffusion Model for High-quality and Realistic 3D Human Generation

Recent text-to-3D methods employing diffusion models have made significant advancements in 3D human generation. However, these approaches face challenges due to the limitations of the text-to-image diffusion model, which lacks an understanding of 3D structures. Consequently, these methods struggle to achieve high-quality human generation, resulting in smooth geometry and cartoon-like appearances. In this paper, we observed that fine-tuning text-to-image diffusion models with normal maps enables their adaptation into text-to-normal diffusion models, which enhances the 2D perception of 3D geometry while preserving the priors learned from large-scale datasets. Therefore, we propose HumanNorm, a novel approach for high-quality and realistic 3D human generation by learning the normal diffusion model including a normal-adapted diffusion model and a normal-aligned diffusion model. The normal-adapted diffusion model can generate high-fidelity normal maps corresponding to prompts with view-dependent text. The normal-aligned diffusion model learns to generate color images aligned with the normal maps, thereby transforming physical geometry details into realistic appearance. Leveraging the proposed normal diffusion model, we devise a progressive geometry generation strategy and coarse-to-fine texture generation strategy to enhance the efficiency and robustness of 3D human generation. Comprehensive experiments substantiate our method's ability to generate 3D humans with intricate geometry and realistic appearances, significantly outperforming existing text-to-3D methods in both geometry and texture quality. The project page of HumanNorm is https://humannorm.github.io/.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 2, 2023 1

AIGI-Holmes: Towards Explainable and Generalizable AI-Generated Image Detection via Multimodal Large Language Models

The rapid development of AI-generated content (AIGC) technology has led to the misuse of highly realistic AI-generated images (AIGI) in spreading misinformation, posing a threat to public information security. Although existing AIGI detection techniques are generally effective, they face two issues: 1) a lack of human-verifiable explanations, and 2) a lack of generalization in the latest generation technology. To address these issues, we introduce a large-scale and comprehensive dataset, Holmes-Set, which includes the Holmes-SFTSet, an instruction-tuning dataset with explanations on whether images are AI-generated, and the Holmes-DPOSet, a human-aligned preference dataset. Our work introduces an efficient data annotation method called the Multi-Expert Jury, enhancing data generation through structured MLLM explanations and quality control via cross-model evaluation, expert defect filtering, and human preference modification. In addition, we propose Holmes Pipeline, a meticulously designed three-stage training framework comprising visual expert pre-training, supervised fine-tuning, and direct preference optimization. Holmes Pipeline adapts multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for AIGI detection while generating human-verifiable and human-aligned explanations, ultimately yielding our model AIGI-Holmes. During the inference stage, we introduce a collaborative decoding strategy that integrates the model perception of the visual expert with the semantic reasoning of MLLMs, further enhancing the generalization capabilities. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our AIGI-Holmes.

  • 10 authors
·
Jul 3

Free Lunch Alignment of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models without Preference Image Pairs

Recent advances in diffusion-based text-to-image (T2I) models have led to remarkable success in generating high-quality images from textual prompts. However, ensuring accurate alignment between the text and the generated image remains a significant challenge for state-of-the-art diffusion models. To address this, existing studies employ reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) to align T2I outputs with human preferences. These methods, however, either rely directly on paired image preference data or require a learned reward function, both of which depend heavily on costly, high-quality human annotations and thus face scalability limitations. In this work, we introduce Text Preference Optimization (TPO), a framework that enables "free-lunch" alignment of T2I models, achieving alignment without the need for paired image preference data. TPO works by training the model to prefer matched prompts over mismatched prompts, which are constructed by perturbing original captions using a large language model. Our framework is general and compatible with existing preference-based algorithms. We extend both DPO and KTO to our setting, resulting in TDPO and TKTO. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations across multiple benchmarks show that our methods consistently outperform their original counterparts, delivering better human preference scores and improved text-to-image alignment. Our Open-source code is available at https://github.com/DSL-Lab/T2I-Free-Lunch-Alignment.

HunyuanVideo-Avatar: High-Fidelity Audio-Driven Human Animation for Multiple Characters

Recent years have witnessed significant progress in audio-driven human animation. However, critical challenges remain in (i) generating highly dynamic videos while preserving character consistency, (ii) achieving precise emotion alignment between characters and audio, and (iii) enabling multi-character audio-driven animation. To address these challenges, we propose HunyuanVideo-Avatar, a multimodal diffusion transformer (MM-DiT)-based model capable of simultaneously generating dynamic, emotion-controllable, and multi-character dialogue videos. Concretely, HunyuanVideo-Avatar introduces three key innovations: (i) A character image injection module is designed to replace the conventional addition-based character conditioning scheme, eliminating the inherent condition mismatch between training and inference. This ensures the dynamic motion and strong character consistency; (ii) An Audio Emotion Module (AEM) is introduced to extract and transfer the emotional cues from an emotion reference image to the target generated video, enabling fine-grained and accurate emotion style control; (iii) A Face-Aware Audio Adapter (FAA) is proposed to isolate the audio-driven character with latent-level face mask, enabling independent audio injection via cross-attention for multi-character scenarios. These innovations empower HunyuanVideo-Avatar to surpass state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets and a newly proposed wild dataset, generating realistic avatars in dynamic, immersive scenarios.

  • 9 authors
·
May 26 1

For a semiotic AI: Bridging computer vision and visual semiotics for computational observation of large scale facial image archives

Social networks are creating a digital world in which the cognitive, emotional, and pragmatic value of the imagery of human faces and bodies is arguably changing. However, researchers in the digital humanities are often ill-equipped to study these phenomena at scale. This work presents FRESCO (Face Representation in E-Societies through Computational Observation), a framework designed to explore the socio-cultural implications of images on social media platforms at scale. FRESCO deconstructs images into numerical and categorical variables using state-of-the-art computer vision techniques, aligning with the principles of visual semiotics. The framework analyzes images across three levels: the plastic level, encompassing fundamental visual features like lines and colors; the figurative level, representing specific entities or concepts; and the enunciation level, which focuses particularly on constructing the point of view of the spectator and observer. These levels are analyzed to discern deeper narrative layers within the imagery. Experimental validation confirms the reliability and utility of FRESCO, and we assess its consistency and precision across two public datasets. Subsequently, we introduce the FRESCO score, a metric derived from the framework's output that serves as a reliable measure of similarity in image content.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 3, 2024

HumanVLM: Foundation for Human-Scene Vision-Language Model

Human-scene vision-language tasks are increasingly prevalent in diverse social applications, yet recent advancements predominantly rely on models specifically tailored to individual tasks. Emerging research indicates that large vision-language models (VLMs) can enhance performance across various downstream vision-language understanding tasks. However, general-domain models often underperform in specialized fields. This study introduces a domain-specific Large Vision-Language Model, Human-Scene Vision-Language Model (HumanVLM), designed to provide a foundation for human-scene Vision-Language tasks. Specifically, (1) we create a large-scale human-scene multimodal image-text dataset (HumanCaption-10M) sourced from the Internet to facilitate domain-specific alignment; (2) develop a captioning approach for human-centered images, capturing human faces, bodies, and backgrounds, and construct a high-quality Human-Scene image-text dataset (HumanCaptionHQ, about 311k pairs) that contain as much detailed information as possible about human; (3) Using HumanCaption-10M and HumanCaptionHQ, we train a HumanVLM. In the experiments, we then evaluate our HumanVLM across varous downstream tasks, where it demonstrates superior overall performance among multimodal models of comparable scale, particularly excelling in human-related tasks and significantly outperforming similar models, including Qwen2VL and ChatGPT-4o. HumanVLM, alongside the data introduced, will stimulate the research in human-around fields.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 5, 2024

How to Boost Face Recognition with StyleGAN?

State-of-the-art face recognition systems require vast amounts of labeled training data. Given the priority of privacy in face recognition applications, the data is limited to celebrity web crawls, which have issues such as limited numbers of identities. On the other hand, self-supervised revolution in the industry motivates research on the adaptation of related techniques to facial recognition. One of the most popular practical tricks is to augment the dataset by the samples drawn from generative models while preserving the identity. We show that a simple approach based on fine-tuning pSp encoder for StyleGAN allows us to improve upon the state-of-the-art facial recognition and performs better compared to training on synthetic face identities. We also collect large-scale unlabeled datasets with controllable ethnic constitution -- AfricanFaceSet-5M (5 million images of different people) and AsianFaceSet-3M (3 million images of different people) -- and we show that pretraining on each of them improves recognition of the respective ethnicities (as well as others), while combining all unlabeled datasets results in the biggest performance increase. Our self-supervised strategy is the most useful with limited amounts of labeled training data, which can be beneficial for more tailored face recognition tasks and when facing privacy concerns. Evaluation is based on a standard RFW dataset and a new large-scale RB-WebFace benchmark. The code and data are made publicly available at https://github.com/seva100/stylegan-for-facerec.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 18, 2022

SIG: A Synthetic Identity Generation Pipeline for Generating Evaluation Datasets for Face Recognition

As Artificial Intelligence applications expand, the evaluation of models faces heightened scrutiny. Ensuring public readiness requires evaluation datasets, which differ from training data by being disjoint and ethically sourced in compliance with privacy regulations. The performance and fairness of face recognition systems depend significantly on the quality and representativeness of these evaluation datasets. This data is sometimes scraped from the internet without user's consent, causing ethical concerns that can prohibit its use without proper releases. In rare cases, data is collected in a controlled environment with consent, however, this process is time-consuming, expensive, and logistically difficult to execute. This creates a barrier for those unable to conjure the immense resources required to gather ethically sourced evaluation datasets. To address these challenges, we introduce the Synthetic Identity Generation pipeline, or SIG, that allows for the targeted creation of ethical, balanced datasets for face recognition evaluation. Our proposed and demonstrated pipeline generates high-quality images of synthetic identities with controllable pose, facial features, and demographic attributes, such as race, gender, and age. We also release an open-source evaluation dataset named ControlFace10k, consisting of 10,008 face images of 3,336 unique synthetic identities balanced across race, gender, and age, generated using the proposed SIG pipeline. We analyze ControlFace10k along with a non-synthetic BUPT dataset using state-of-the-art face recognition algorithms to demonstrate its effectiveness as an evaluation tool. This analysis highlights the dataset's characteristics and its utility in assessing algorithmic bias across different demographic groups.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 12, 2024

MagicFace: Training-free Universal-Style Human Image Customized Synthesis

Current human image customization methods leverage Stable Diffusion (SD) for its rich semantic prior. However, since SD is not specifically designed for human-oriented generation, these methods often require extensive fine-tuning on large-scale datasets, which renders them susceptible to overfitting and hinders their ability to personalize individuals with previously unseen styles. Moreover, these methods extensively focus on single-concept human image synthesis and lack the flexibility to customize individuals using multiple given concepts, thereby impeding their broader practical application. This paper proposes MagicFace, a novel training-free method for multi-concept universal-style human image personalized synthesis. Our core idea is to simulate how humans create images given specific concepts, i.e., first establish a semantic layout considering factors such as concepts' shape and posture, then optimize details by comparing with concepts at the pixel level. To implement this process, we introduce a coarse-to-fine generation pipeline, involving two sequential stages: semantic layout construction and concept feature injection. This is achieved by our Reference-aware Self-Attention (RSA) and Region-grouped Blend Attention (RBA) mechanisms. In the first stage, RSA enables the latent image to query features from all reference concepts simultaneously, extracting the overall semantic understanding to facilitate the initial semantic layout establishment. In the second stage, we employ an attention-based semantic segmentation method to pinpoint the latent generated regions of all concepts at each step. Following this, RBA divides the pixels of the latent image into semantic groups, with each group querying fine-grained features from the corresponding reference concept. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our MagicFace.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 14, 2024

FACET: Fairness in Computer Vision Evaluation Benchmark

Computer vision models have known performance disparities across attributes such as gender and skin tone. This means during tasks such as classification and detection, model performance differs for certain classes based on the demographics of the people in the image. These disparities have been shown to exist, but until now there has not been a unified approach to measure these differences for common use-cases of computer vision models. We present a new benchmark named FACET (FAirness in Computer Vision EvaluaTion), a large, publicly available evaluation set of 32k images for some of the most common vision tasks - image classification, object detection and segmentation. For every image in FACET, we hired expert reviewers to manually annotate person-related attributes such as perceived skin tone and hair type, manually draw bounding boxes and label fine-grained person-related classes such as disk jockey or guitarist. In addition, we use FACET to benchmark state-of-the-art vision models and present a deeper understanding of potential performance disparities and challenges across sensitive demographic attributes. With the exhaustive annotations collected, we probe models using single demographics attributes as well as multiple attributes using an intersectional approach (e.g. hair color and perceived skin tone). Our results show that classification, detection, segmentation, and visual grounding models exhibit performance disparities across demographic attributes and intersections of attributes. These harms suggest that not all people represented in datasets receive fair and equitable treatment in these vision tasks. We hope current and future results using our benchmark will contribute to fairer, more robust vision models. FACET is available publicly at https://facet.metademolab.com/

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 31, 2023 2

StableIdentity: Inserting Anybody into Anywhere at First Sight

Recent advances in large pretrained text-to-image models have shown unprecedented capabilities for high-quality human-centric generation, however, customizing face identity is still an intractable problem. Existing methods cannot ensure stable identity preservation and flexible editability, even with several images for each subject during training. In this work, we propose StableIdentity, which allows identity-consistent recontextualization with just one face image. More specifically, we employ a face encoder with an identity prior to encode the input face, and then land the face representation into a space with an editable prior, which is constructed from celeb names. By incorporating identity prior and editability prior, the learned identity can be injected anywhere with various contexts. In addition, we design a masked two-phase diffusion loss to boost the pixel-level perception of the input face and maintain the diversity of generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate our method outperforms previous customization methods. In addition, the learned identity can be flexibly combined with the off-the-shelf modules such as ControlNet. Notably, to the best knowledge, we are the first to directly inject the identity learned from a single image into video/3D generation without finetuning. We believe that the proposed StableIdentity is an important step to unify image, video, and 3D customized generation models.

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 29, 2024 2

Effective Whole-body Pose Estimation with Two-stages Distillation

Whole-body pose estimation localizes the human body, hand, face, and foot keypoints in an image. This task is challenging due to multi-scale body parts, fine-grained localization for low-resolution regions, and data scarcity. Meanwhile, applying a highly efficient and accurate pose estimator to widely human-centric understanding and generation tasks is urgent. In this work, we present a two-stage pose Distillation for Whole-body Pose estimators, named DWPose, to improve their effectiveness and efficiency. The first-stage distillation designs a weight-decay strategy while utilizing a teacher's intermediate feature and final logits with both visible and invisible keypoints to supervise the student from scratch. The second stage distills the student model itself to further improve performance. Different from the previous self-knowledge distillation, this stage finetunes the student's head with only 20% training time as a plug-and-play training strategy. For data limitations, we explore the UBody dataset that contains diverse facial expressions and hand gestures for real-life applications. Comprehensive experiments show the superiority of our proposed simple yet effective methods. We achieve new state-of-the-art performance on COCO-WholeBody, significantly boosting the whole-body AP of RTMPose-l from 64.8% to 66.5%, even surpassing RTMPose-x teacher with 65.3% AP. We release a series of models with different sizes, from tiny to large, for satisfying various downstream tasks. Our codes and models are available at https://github.com/IDEA-Research/DWPose.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 28, 2023

One-Stage 3D Whole-Body Mesh Recovery with Component Aware Transformer

Whole-body mesh recovery aims to estimate the 3D human body, face, and hands parameters from a single image. It is challenging to perform this task with a single network due to resolution issues, i.e., the face and hands are usually located in extremely small regions. Existing works usually detect hands and faces, enlarge their resolution to feed in a specific network to predict the parameter, and finally fuse the results. While this copy-paste pipeline can capture the fine-grained details of the face and hands, the connections between different parts cannot be easily recovered in late fusion, leading to implausible 3D rotation and unnatural pose. In this work, we propose a one-stage pipeline for expressive whole-body mesh recovery, named OSX, without separate networks for each part. Specifically, we design a Component Aware Transformer (CAT) composed of a global body encoder and a local face/hand decoder. The encoder predicts the body parameters and provides a high-quality feature map for the decoder, which performs a feature-level upsample-crop scheme to extract high-resolution part-specific features and adopt keypoint-guided deformable attention to estimate hand and face precisely. The whole pipeline is simple yet effective without any manual post-processing and naturally avoids implausible prediction. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of OSX. Lastly, we build a large-scale Upper-Body dataset (UBody) with high-quality 2D and 3D whole-body annotations. It contains persons with partially visible bodies in diverse real-life scenarios to bridge the gap between the basic task and downstream applications.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 28, 2023

Turn That Frown Upside Down: FaceID Customization via Cross-Training Data

Existing face identity (FaceID) customization methods perform well but are limited to generating identical faces as the input, while in real-world applications, users often desire images of the same person but with variations, such as different expressions (e.g., smiling, angry) or angles (e.g., side profile). This limitation arises from the lack of datasets with controlled input-output facial variations, restricting models' ability to learn effective modifications. To address this issue, we propose CrossFaceID, the first large-scale, high-quality, and publicly available dataset specifically designed to improve the facial modification capabilities of FaceID customization models. Specifically, CrossFaceID consists of 40,000 text-image pairs from approximately 2,000 persons, with each person represented by around 20 images showcasing diverse facial attributes such as poses, expressions, angles, and adornments. During the training stage, a specific face of a person is used as input, and the FaceID customization model is forced to generate another image of the same person but with altered facial features. This allows the FaceID customization model to acquire the ability to personalize and modify known facial features during the inference stage. Experiments show that models fine-tuned on the CrossFaceID dataset retain its performance in preserving FaceID fidelity while significantly improving its face customization capabilities. To facilitate further advancements in the FaceID customization field, our code, constructed datasets, and trained models are fully available to the public.

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 26

Towards Measuring Fairness in AI: the Casual Conversations Dataset

This paper introduces a novel dataset to help researchers evaluate their computer vision and audio models for accuracy across a diverse set of age, genders, apparent skin tones and ambient lighting conditions. Our dataset is composed of 3,011 subjects and contains over 45,000 videos, with an average of 15 videos per person. The videos were recorded in multiple U.S. states with a diverse set of adults in various age, gender and apparent skin tone groups. A key feature is that each subject agreed to participate for their likenesses to be used. Additionally, our age and gender annotations are provided by the subjects themselves. A group of trained annotators labeled the subjects' apparent skin tone using the Fitzpatrick skin type scale. Moreover, annotations for videos recorded in low ambient lighting are also provided. As an application to measure robustness of predictions across certain attributes, we provide a comprehensive study on the top five winners of the DeepFake Detection Challenge (DFDC). Experimental evaluation shows that the winning models are less performant on some specific groups of people, such as subjects with darker skin tones and thus may not generalize to all people. In addition, we also evaluate the state-of-the-art apparent age and gender classification methods. Our experiments provides a thorough analysis on these models in terms of fair treatment of people from various backgrounds.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 6, 2021

A Hierarchical Representation Network for Accurate and Detailed Face Reconstruction from In-The-Wild Images

Limited by the nature of the low-dimensional representational capacity of 3DMM, most of the 3DMM-based face reconstruction (FR) methods fail to recover high-frequency facial details, such as wrinkles, dimples, etc. Some attempt to solve the problem by introducing detail maps or non-linear operations, however, the results are still not vivid. To this end, we in this paper present a novel hierarchical representation network (HRN) to achieve accurate and detailed face reconstruction from a single image. Specifically, we implement the geometry disentanglement and introduce the hierarchical representation to fulfill detailed face modeling. Meanwhile, 3D priors of facial details are incorporated to enhance the accuracy and authenticity of the reconstruction results. We also propose a de-retouching module to achieve better decoupling of the geometry and appearance. It is noteworthy that our framework can be extended to a multi-view fashion by considering detail consistency of different views. Extensive experiments on two single-view and two multi-view FR benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms the existing methods in both reconstruction accuracy and visual effects. Finally, we introduce a high-quality 3D face dataset FaceHD-100 to boost the research of high-fidelity face reconstruction. The project homepage is at https://younglbw.github.io/HRN-homepage/.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 28, 2023

A Lightweight Face Quality Assessment Framework to Improve Face Verification Performance in Real-Time Screening Applications

Face image quality plays a critical role in determining the accuracy and reliability of face verification systems, particularly in real-time screening applications such as surveillance, identity verification, and access control. Low-quality face images, often caused by factors such as motion blur, poor lighting conditions, occlusions, and extreme pose variations, significantly degrade the performance of face recognition models, leading to higher false rejection and false acceptance rates. In this work, we propose a lightweight yet effective framework for automatic face quality assessment, which aims to pre-filter low-quality face images before they are passed to the verification pipeline. Our approach utilises normalised facial landmarks in conjunction with a Random Forest Regression classifier to assess image quality, achieving an accuracy of 96.67%. By integrating this quality assessment module into the face verification process, we observe a substantial improvement in performance, including a comfortable 99.7% reduction in the false rejection rate and enhanced cosine similarity scores when paired with the ArcFace face verification model. To validate our approach, we have conducted experiments on a real-world dataset collected comprising over 600 subjects captured from CCTV footage in unconstrained environments within Dubai Police. Our results demonstrate that the proposed framework effectively mitigates the impact of poor-quality face images, outperforming existing face quality assessment techniques while maintaining computational efficiency. Moreover, the framework specifically addresses two critical challenges in real-time screening: variations in face resolution and pose deviations, both of which are prevalent in practical surveillance scenarios.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 21

InstantID: Zero-shot Identity-Preserving Generation in Seconds

There has been significant progress in personalized image synthesis with methods such as Textual Inversion, DreamBooth, and LoRA. Yet, their real-world applicability is hindered by high storage demands, lengthy fine-tuning processes, and the need for multiple reference images. Conversely, existing ID embedding-based methods, while requiring only a single forward inference, face challenges: they either necessitate extensive fine-tuning across numerous model parameters, lack compatibility with community pre-trained models, or fail to maintain high face fidelity. Addressing these limitations, we introduce InstantID, a powerful diffusion model-based solution. Our plug-and-play module adeptly handles image personalization in various styles using just a single facial image, while ensuring high fidelity. To achieve this, we design a novel IdentityNet by imposing strong semantic and weak spatial conditions, integrating facial and landmark images with textual prompts to steer the image generation. InstantID demonstrates exceptional performance and efficiency, proving highly beneficial in real-world applications where identity preservation is paramount. Moreover, our work seamlessly integrates with popular pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models like SD1.5 and SDXL, serving as an adaptable plugin. Our codes and pre-trained checkpoints will be available at https://github.com/InstantID/InstantID.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 15, 2024 8

15M Multimodal Facial Image-Text Dataset

Currently, image-text-driven multi-modal deep learning models have demonstrated their outstanding potential in many fields. In practice, tasks centered around facial images have broad application prospects. This paper presents FaceCaption-15M, a large-scale, diverse, and high-quality dataset of facial images accompanied by their natural language descriptions (facial image-to-text). This dataset aims to facilitate a study on face-centered tasks. FaceCaption-15M comprises over 15 million pairs of facial images and their corresponding natural language descriptions of facial features, making it the largest facial image-caption dataset to date. We conducted a comprehensive analysis of image quality, text naturalness, text complexity, and text-image relevance to demonstrate the superiority of FaceCaption-15M. To validate the effectiveness of FaceCaption-15M, we first trained a facial language-image pre-training model (FLIP, similar to CLIP) to align facial image with its corresponding captions in feature space. Subsequently, using both image and text encoders and fine-tuning only the linear layer, our FLIP-based models achieved state-of-the-art results on two challenging face-centered tasks. The purpose is to promote research in the field of face-related tasks through the availability of the proposed FaceCaption-15M dataset. All data, codes, and models are publicly available. https://huggingface.co/datasets/OpenFace-CQUPT/FaceCaption-15M

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 11, 2024

Pre-training strategies and datasets for facial representation learning

What is the best way to learn a universal face representation? Recent work on Deep Learning in the area of face analysis has focused on supervised learning for specific tasks of interest (e.g. face recognition, facial landmark localization etc.) but has overlooked the overarching question of how to find a facial representation that can be readily adapted to several facial analysis tasks and datasets. To this end, we make the following 4 contributions: (a) we introduce, for the first time, a comprehensive evaluation benchmark for facial representation learning consisting of 5 important face analysis tasks. (b) We systematically investigate two ways of large-scale representation learning applied to faces: supervised and unsupervised pre-training. Importantly, we focus our evaluations on the case of few-shot facial learning. (c) We investigate important properties of the training datasets including their size and quality (labelled, unlabelled or even uncurated). (d) To draw our conclusions, we conducted a very large number of experiments. Our main two findings are: (1) Unsupervised pre-training on completely in-the-wild, uncurated data provides consistent and, in some cases, significant accuracy improvements for all facial tasks considered. (2) Many existing facial video datasets seem to have a large amount of redundancy. We will release code, and pre-trained models to facilitate future research.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 30, 2021

Age Progression/Regression by Conditional Adversarial Autoencoder

"If I provide you a face image of mine (without telling you the actual age when I took the picture) and a large amount of face images that I crawled (containing labeled faces of different ages but not necessarily paired), can you show me what I would look like when I am 80 or what I was like when I was 5?" The answer is probably a "No." Most existing face aging works attempt to learn the transformation between age groups and thus would require the paired samples as well as the labeled query image. In this paper, we look at the problem from a generative modeling perspective such that no paired samples is required. In addition, given an unlabeled image, the generative model can directly produce the image with desired age attribute. We propose a conditional adversarial autoencoder (CAAE) that learns a face manifold, traversing on which smooth age progression and regression can be realized simultaneously. In CAAE, the face is first mapped to a latent vector through a convolutional encoder, and then the vector is projected to the face manifold conditional on age through a deconvolutional generator. The latent vector preserves personalized face features (i.e., personality) and the age condition controls progression vs. regression. Two adversarial networks are imposed on the encoder and generator, respectively, forcing to generate more photo-realistic faces. Experimental results demonstrate the appealing performance and flexibility of the proposed framework by comparing with the state-of-the-art and ground truth.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 27, 2017

LMME3DHF: Benchmarking and Evaluating Multimodal 3D Human Face Generation with LMMs

The rapid advancement in generative artificial intelligence have enabled the creation of 3D human faces (HFs) for applications including media production, virtual reality, security, healthcare, and game development, etc. However, assessing the quality and realism of these AI-generated 3D human faces remains a significant challenge due to the subjective nature of human perception and innate perceptual sensitivity to facial features. To this end, we conduct a comprehensive study on the quality assessment of AI-generated 3D human faces. We first introduce Gen3DHF, a large-scale benchmark comprising 2,000 videos of AI-Generated 3D Human Faces along with 4,000 Mean Opinion Scores (MOS) collected across two dimensions, i.e., quality and authenticity, 2,000 distortion-aware saliency maps and distortion descriptions. Based on Gen3DHF, we propose LMME3DHF, a Large Multimodal Model (LMM)-based metric for Evaluating 3DHF capable of quality and authenticity score prediction, distortion-aware visual question answering, and distortion-aware saliency prediction. Experimental results show that LMME3DHF achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing existing methods in both accurately predicting quality scores for AI-generated 3D human faces and effectively identifying distortion-aware salient regions and distortion types, while maintaining strong alignment with human perceptual judgments. Both the Gen3DHF database and the LMME3DHF will be released upon the publication.

  • 9 authors
·
Apr 29

IDiff-Face: Synthetic-based Face Recognition through Fizzy Identity-Conditioned Diffusion Models

The availability of large-scale authentic face databases has been crucial to the significant advances made in face recognition research over the past decade. However, legal and ethical concerns led to the recent retraction of many of these databases by their creators, raising questions about the continuity of future face recognition research without one of its key resources. Synthetic datasets have emerged as a promising alternative to privacy-sensitive authentic data for face recognition development. However, recent synthetic datasets that are used to train face recognition models suffer either from limitations in intra-class diversity or cross-class (identity) discrimination, leading to less optimal accuracies, far away from the accuracies achieved by models trained on authentic data. This paper targets this issue by proposing IDiff-Face, a novel approach based on conditional latent diffusion models for synthetic identity generation with realistic identity variations for face recognition training. Through extensive evaluations, our proposed synthetic-based face recognition approach pushed the limits of state-of-the-art performances, achieving, for example, 98.00% accuracy on the Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) benchmark, far ahead from the recent synthetic-based face recognition solutions with 95.40% and bridging the gap to authentic-based face recognition with 99.82% accuracy.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 9, 2023

Visual Speech-Aware Perceptual 3D Facial Expression Reconstruction from Videos

The recent state of the art on monocular 3D face reconstruction from image data has made some impressive advancements, thanks to the advent of Deep Learning. However, it has mostly focused on input coming from a single RGB image, overlooking the following important factors: a) Nowadays, the vast majority of facial image data of interest do not originate from single images but rather from videos, which contain rich dynamic information. b) Furthermore, these videos typically capture individuals in some form of verbal communication (public talks, teleconferences, audiovisual human-computer interactions, interviews, monologues/dialogues in movies, etc). When existing 3D face reconstruction methods are applied in such videos, the artifacts in the reconstruction of the shape and motion of the mouth area are often severe, since they do not match well with the speech audio. To overcome the aforementioned limitations, we present the first method for visual speech-aware perceptual reconstruction of 3D mouth expressions. We do this by proposing a "lipread" loss, which guides the fitting process so that the elicited perception from the 3D reconstructed talking head resembles that of the original video footage. We demonstrate that, interestingly, the lipread loss is better suited for 3D reconstruction of mouth movements compared to traditional landmark losses, and even direct 3D supervision. Furthermore, the devised method does not rely on any text transcriptions or corresponding audio, rendering it ideal for training in unlabeled datasets. We verify the efficiency of our method through exhaustive objective evaluations on three large-scale datasets, as well as subjective evaluation with two web-based user studies.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 22, 2022 1

Deformable 3D Gaussian Splatting for Animatable Human Avatars

Recent advances in neural radiance fields enable novel view synthesis of photo-realistic images in dynamic settings, which can be applied to scenarios with human animation. Commonly used implicit backbones to establish accurate models, however, require many input views and additional annotations such as human masks, UV maps and depth maps. In this work, we propose ParDy-Human (Parameterized Dynamic Human Avatar), a fully explicit approach to construct a digital avatar from as little as a single monocular sequence. ParDy-Human introduces parameter-driven dynamics into 3D Gaussian Splatting where 3D Gaussians are deformed by a human pose model to animate the avatar. Our method is composed of two parts: A first module that deforms canonical 3D Gaussians according to SMPL vertices and a consecutive module that further takes their designed joint encodings and predicts per Gaussian deformations to deal with dynamics beyond SMPL vertex deformations. Images are then synthesized by a rasterizer. ParDy-Human constitutes an explicit model for realistic dynamic human avatars which requires significantly fewer training views and images. Our avatars learning is free of additional annotations such as masks and can be trained with variable backgrounds while inferring full-resolution images efficiently even on consumer hardware. We provide experimental evidence to show that ParDy-Human outperforms state-of-the-art methods on ZJU-MoCap and THUman4.0 datasets both quantitatively and visually.

  • 8 authors
·
Dec 22, 2023

Unveiling the Human-like Similarities of Automatic Facial Expression Recognition: An Empirical Exploration through Explainable AI

Facial expression recognition is vital for human behavior analysis, and deep learning has enabled models that can outperform humans. However, it is unclear how closely they mimic human processing. This study aims to explore the similarity between deep neural networks and human perception by comparing twelve different networks, including both general object classifiers and FER-specific models. We employ an innovative global explainable AI method to generate heatmaps, revealing crucial facial regions for the twelve networks trained on six facial expressions. We assess these results both quantitatively and qualitatively, comparing them to ground truth masks based on Friesen and Ekman's description and among them. We use Intersection over Union (IoU) and normalized correlation coefficients for comparisons. We generate 72 heatmaps to highlight critical regions for each expression and architecture. Qualitatively, models with pre-trained weights show more similarity in heatmaps compared to those without pre-training. Specifically, eye and nose areas influence certain facial expressions, while the mouth is consistently important across all models and expressions. Quantitatively, we find low average IoU values (avg. 0.2702) across all expressions and architectures. The best-performing architecture averages 0.3269, while the worst-performing one averages 0.2066. Dendrograms, built with the normalized correlation coefficient, reveal two main clusters for most expressions: models with pre-training and models without pre-training. Findings suggest limited alignment between human and AI facial expression recognition, with network architectures influencing the similarity, as similar architectures prioritize similar facial regions.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 22, 2024

MagiCapture: High-Resolution Multi-Concept Portrait Customization

Large-scale text-to-image models including Stable Diffusion are capable of generating high-fidelity photorealistic portrait images. There is an active research area dedicated to personalizing these models, aiming to synthesize specific subjects or styles using provided sets of reference images. However, despite the plausible results from these personalization methods, they tend to produce images that often fall short of realism and are not yet on a commercially viable level. This is particularly noticeable in portrait image generation, where any unnatural artifact in human faces is easily discernible due to our inherent human bias. To address this, we introduce MagiCapture, a personalization method for integrating subject and style concepts to generate high-resolution portrait images using just a few subject and style references. For instance, given a handful of random selfies, our fine-tuned model can generate high-quality portrait images in specific styles, such as passport or profile photos. The main challenge with this task is the absence of ground truth for the composed concepts, leading to a reduction in the quality of the final output and an identity shift of the source subject. To address these issues, we present a novel Attention Refocusing loss coupled with auxiliary priors, both of which facilitate robust learning within this weakly supervised learning setting. Our pipeline also includes additional post-processing steps to ensure the creation of highly realistic outputs. MagiCapture outperforms other baselines in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations and can also be generalized to other non-human objects.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 13, 2023 3

HumanDreamer-X: Photorealistic Single-image Human Avatars Reconstruction via Gaussian Restoration

Single-image human reconstruction is vital for digital human modeling applications but remains an extremely challenging task. Current approaches rely on generative models to synthesize multi-view images for subsequent 3D reconstruction and animation. However, directly generating multiple views from a single human image suffers from geometric inconsistencies, resulting in issues like fragmented or blurred limbs in the reconstructed models. To tackle these limitations, we introduce HumanDreamer-X, a novel framework that integrates multi-view human generation and reconstruction into a unified pipeline, which significantly enhances the geometric consistency and visual fidelity of the reconstructed 3D models. In this framework, 3D Gaussian Splatting serves as an explicit 3D representation to provide initial geometry and appearance priority. Building upon this foundation, HumanFixer is trained to restore 3DGS renderings, which guarantee photorealistic results. Furthermore, we delve into the inherent challenges associated with attention mechanisms in multi-view human generation, and propose an attention modulation strategy that effectively enhances geometric details identity consistency across multi-view. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach markedly improves generation and reconstruction PSNR quality metrics by 16.45% and 12.65%, respectively, achieving a PSNR of up to 25.62 dB, while also showing generalization capabilities on in-the-wild data and applicability to various human reconstruction backbone models.

WebFace260M: A Benchmark Unveiling the Power of Million-Scale Deep Face Recognition

In this paper, we contribute a new million-scale face benchmark containing noisy 4M identities/260M faces (WebFace260M) and cleaned 2M identities/42M faces (WebFace42M) training data, as well as an elaborately designed time-constrained evaluation protocol. Firstly, we collect 4M name list and download 260M faces from the Internet. Then, a Cleaning Automatically utilizing Self-Training (CAST) pipeline is devised to purify the tremendous WebFace260M, which is efficient and scalable. To the best of our knowledge, the cleaned WebFace42M is the largest public face recognition training set and we expect to close the data gap between academia and industry. Referring to practical scenarios, Face Recognition Under Inference Time conStraint (FRUITS) protocol and a test set are constructed to comprehensively evaluate face matchers. Equipped with this benchmark, we delve into million-scale face recognition problems. A distributed framework is developed to train face recognition models efficiently without tampering with the performance. Empowered by WebFace42M, we reduce relative 40% failure rate on the challenging IJB-C set, and ranks the 3rd among 430 entries on NIST-FRVT. Even 10% data (WebFace4M) shows superior performance compared with public training set. Furthermore, comprehensive baselines are established on our rich-attribute test set under FRUITS-100ms/500ms/1000ms protocol, including MobileNet, EfficientNet, AttentionNet, ResNet, SENet, ResNeXt and RegNet families. Benchmark website is https://www.face-benchmark.org.

  • 11 authors
·
Mar 6, 2021

Faceptor: A Generalist Model for Face Perception

With the comprehensive research conducted on various face analysis tasks, there is a growing interest among researchers to develop a unified approach to face perception. Existing methods mainly discuss unified representation and training, which lack task extensibility and application efficiency. To tackle this issue, we focus on the unified model structure, exploring a face generalist model. As an intuitive design, Naive Faceptor enables tasks with the same output shape and granularity to share the structural design of the standardized output head, achieving improved task extensibility. Furthermore, Faceptor is proposed to adopt a well-designed single-encoder dual-decoder architecture, allowing task-specific queries to represent new-coming semantics. This design enhances the unification of model structure while improving application efficiency in terms of storage overhead. Additionally, we introduce Layer-Attention into Faceptor, enabling the model to adaptively select features from optimal layers to perform the desired tasks. Through joint training on 13 face perception datasets, Faceptor achieves exceptional performance in facial landmark localization, face parsing, age estimation, expression recognition, binary attribute classification, and face recognition, achieving or surpassing specialized methods in most tasks. Our training framework can also be applied to auxiliary supervised learning, significantly improving performance in data-sparse tasks such as age estimation and expression recognition. The code and models will be made publicly available at https://github.com/lxq1000/Faceptor.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 14, 2024

HumanVid: Demystifying Training Data for Camera-controllable Human Image Animation

Human image animation involves generating videos from a character photo, allowing user control and unlocking potential for video and movie production. While recent approaches yield impressive results using high-quality training data, the inaccessibility of these datasets hampers fair and transparent benchmarking. Moreover, these approaches prioritize 2D human motion and overlook the significance of camera motions in videos, leading to limited control and unstable video generation.To demystify the training data, we present HumanVid, the first large-scale high-quality dataset tailored for human image animation, which combines crafted real-world and synthetic data. For the real-world data, we compile a vast collection of copyright-free real-world videos from the internet. Through a carefully designed rule-based filtering strategy, we ensure the inclusion of high-quality videos, resulting in a collection of 20K human-centric videos in 1080P resolution. Human and camera motion annotation is accomplished using a 2D pose estimator and a SLAM-based method. For the synthetic data, we gather 2,300 copyright-free 3D avatar assets to augment existing available 3D assets. Notably, we introduce a rule-based camera trajectory generation method, enabling the synthetic pipeline to incorporate diverse and precise camera motion annotation, which can rarely be found in real-world data. To verify the effectiveness of HumanVid, we establish a baseline model named CamAnimate, short for Camera-controllable Human Animation, that considers both human and camera motions as conditions. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that such simple baseline training on our HumanVid achieves state-of-the-art performance in controlling both human pose and camera motions, setting a new benchmark. Code and data will be publicly available at https://github.com/zhenzhiwang/HumanVid/.

  • 11 authors
·
Jul 24, 2024 3