Abstract: In general automatic face classification applications images are captured in natural environments. In these cases, the performance is affected by variations in facial images related to illumination, pose, occlusion or expressions. Most of the existing face classification systems use only the internal features information, composed by eyes, nose and mouth, since they are more difficult to imitate. Nevertheless, nowadays a lot of applications not related to security are developed, and in these cases the information located at head, chin or ears zones (external features) can be useful to improve the current accuracies. However, the lack of a natural alignment in these areas makes difficult to extract these features applying classic Bottom-Up methods. In this paper, we propose a complete scheme based on a Top-Down reconstruction algorithm to extract external features of face images. To test our system we have performed face verification experiments using public databases, given that identity verification is a general task that has many real life applications. We have considered images uniformly illuminated, images with occlusions and images with high local changes in the illumination, and the obtained results show that the information contributed by the external features can be useful for verification purposes, specially significant when faces are partially occluded.

Abstract: This paper introduces a new facet of social media, namely that depicting social interaction. More concretely, we address this problem from the perspective of nonverbal behavior-based analysis of competitive meetings. For our study, we made use of “The Apprentice” reality TV show, which features a competition for a real, highly paid corporate job. Our analysis is centered around two tasks regarding a person's role in a meeting: predicting the person with the highest status, and predicting the fired candidates. We address this problem by adopting both supervised and unsupervised strategies. The current study was carried out using nonverbal audio cues. Our approach is based only on the nonverbal interaction dynamics during the meeting without relying on the spoken words. The analysis is based on two types of data: individual and relational measures. Results obtained from the analysis of a full season of the show are promising (up to 85.7% of accuracy in the first case and up to 92.8% in the second case). Our approach has been conveniently compared with the Influence Model, demonstrating its superiority.

Abstract: Non-linear dimensionality reduction techniques are affected by two critical aspects: (i) the design of the adjacency graphs, and (ii) the embedding of new test data-the out-of-sample problem. For the first aspect, the proposed solutions, in general, were heuristically driven. For the second aspect, the difficulty resides in finding an accurate mapping that transfers unseen data samples into an existing manifold. Past works addressing these two aspects were heavily parametric in the sense that the optimal performance is only achieved for a suitable parameter choice that should be known in advance. In this paper, we demonstrate that the sparse representation theory not only serves for automatic graph construction as shown in recent works, but also represents an accurate alternative for out-of-sample embedding. Considering for a case study the Laplacian Eigenmaps, we applied our method to the face recognition problem. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed out-of-sample embedding, experiments are conducted using the K-nearest neighbor (KNN) and Kernel Support Vector Machines (KSVM) classifiers on six public face datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed model is able to achieve high categorization effectiveness as well as high consistency with non-linear embeddings/manifolds obtained in batch modes.