Active Appearance Model Features Research Articles

Research into Human Face Recognition Algorithm Based on Active Appearance Model Feature Positioning

Active Appearance Model (AAM) is a valid statistical algorithm for human face alignment, which composes of two parts, namely AAM sub-space model and AAM searching process. AAM has three sub-spaces, namely form sub-space, texture sub-space and surface sub-face. As it is stated above, AAM is built on the dot distribution model. Different from ASM, it not only conducts statistical analysis of textures through the shape information, but also explores the connection between the shape and the texture. During the training period, it mainly targets at finding out the connection between model parameter changes and changes of shapes and textures. In terms of new image searching, model parameters can be continuously adjusted according to the connection so as to make the composite image approximate the new one as much as possible. The shape and the texture at the moment are regarded at the shape and the texture of the new image.

Speech driven photo realistic facial animation based on an articulatory DBN model and AAM features

This paper presents a photo realistic facial animation synthesis approach based on an audio visual articulatory dynamic Bayesian network model (AF_AVDBN), in which the maximum asynchronies between the articulatory features, such as lips, tongue and glottis/velum, can be controlled. Perceptual Linear Prediction (PLP) features from audio speech, as well as active appearance model (AAM) features from face images of an audio visual continuous speech database, are adopted to train the AF_AVDBN model parameters. Based on the trained model, given an input audio speech, the optimal AAM visual features are estimated via a maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) criterion, which are then used to construct face images for the animation. In our experiments, facial animations are synthesized for 20 continuous audio speech sentences, using the proposed AF_AVDBN model, as well as the state-of-art methods, being the audio visual state synchronous DBN model (SS_DBN) implementing a multi-stream Hidden Markov Model, and the state asynchronous DBN model (SA_DBN). Objective evaluations on the learned AAM features show that much more accurate visual features can be learned from the AF_AVDBN model. Subjective evaluations show that the synthesized facial animations using AF_AVDBN are better than those using the state based SA_DBN and SS_DBN models, in the overall naturalness and matching accuracy of the mouth movements to the speech content.

Tensor-Based AAM with Continuous Variation Estimation: Application to Variation-Robust Face Recognition

The Active appearance model (AAM) is a well-known model that can represent a non-rigid object effectively. However, the fitting result is often unsatisfactory when an input image deviates from the training images due to its fixed shape and appearance model. To obtain more robust AAM fitting, we propose a tensor-based AAM that can handle a variety of subjects, poses, expressions, and illuminations in the tensor algebra framework, which consists of an image tensor and a model tensor. The image tensor estimates image variations such as pose, expression, and illumination of the input image using two different variation estimation techniques: discrete and continuous variation estimation. The model tensor generates variation-specific AAM basis vectors from the estimated image variations, which leads to more accurate fitting results. To validate the usefulness of the tensor-based AAM, we performed variation-robust face recognition using the tensor-based AAM fitting results. To do, we propose indirect AAM feature transformation. Experimental results show that tensor-based AAM with continuous variation estimation outperforms that with discrete variation estimation and conventional AAM in terms of the average fitting error and the face recognition rate.

Natural facial expression recognition using differential-AAM and manifold learning

This paper proposes a novel natural facial expression recognition method that recognizes a sequence of dynamic facial expression images using the differential active appearance model (AAM) and manifold learning as follows. First, the differential-AAM features (DAFs) are computed by the difference of the AAM parameters between an input face image and a reference (neutral expression) face image. Second, manifold learning embeds the DAFs on the smooth and continuous feature space. Third, the input facial expression is recognized through two steps: (1) computing the distances between the input image sequence and gallery image sequences using directed Hausdorff distance (DHD) and (2) selecting the expression by a majority voting of k -nearest neighbors ( k -NN) sequences in the gallery. The DAFs are robust and efficient for the facial expression analysis due to the elimination of the inter-person, camera, and illumination variations. Since the DAFs treat the neutral expression image as the reference image, the neutral expression image must be found effectively. This is done via the differential facial expression probability density model (DFEPDM) using the kernel density approximation of the positively directional DAFs changing from neutral to angry (happy, surprised) and negatively directional DAFs changing from angry (happy, surprised) to neutral. Then, a face image is considered to be the neutral expression if it has the maximum DFEPDM in the input sequences. Experimental results show that (1) the DAFs improve the facial expression recognition performance over conventional AAM features by 20% and (2) the sequence-based k -NN classifier provides a 95% facial expression recognition performance on the facial expression database (FED06).