Context-assisted face clustering framework with human-in-the-loop

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Automatic face clustering, which aims to group faces referring to the same people together, is a key component for face tagging and image management. Standard face clustering approaches that are based on analyzing facial features can already achieve high-precision results. However, they often suffer from low recall due to the large variation of faces in pose, expression, illumination, occlusion, etc. To improve the clustering recall without reducing the high precision, we leverage the heterogeneous context information to iteratively merge the clusters referring to same entities. We first investigate the appropriate methods to utilize the context information at the cluster level, including using of “common scene”, people co-occurrence, human attributes, and clothing. We then propose a unified framework that employs bootstrapping to automatically learn adaptive rules to integrate this heterogeneous contextual information, along with facial features, together. Finally, we discuss a novel methodology for integrating human-in-the-loop feedback mechanisms that leverage human interaction to achieve the high-quality clustering results. Experimental results on two personal photo collections and one real-world surveillance dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in improving recall while maintaining very high precision of face clustering.