Bogdan Raducanu, & Fadi Dornaika. (2010). Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition Using Laplacian Eigenmaps-Based Manifold Learning. In IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (156–161).
Abstract: In this paper, we propose an integrated framework for tracking, modelling and recognition of facial expressions. The main contributions are: (i) a view- and texture independent scheme that exploits facial action parameters estimated by an appearance-based 3D face tracker; (ii) the complexity of the non-linear facial expression space is modelled through a manifold, whose structure is learned using Laplacian Eigenmaps. The projected facial expressions are afterwards recognized based on Nearest Neighbor classifier; (iii) with the proposed approach, we developed an application for an AIBO robot, in which it mirrors the perceived facial expression.
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Bogdan Raducanu, & Fadi Dornaika. (2012). Appearance-based Face Recognition Using A Supervised Manifold Learning Framework. In IEEE Workshop on the Applications of Computer Vision (pp. 465–470). IEEE Xplore.
Abstract: Many natural image sets, depicting objects whose appearance is changing due to motion, pose or light variations, can be considered samples of a low-dimension nonlinear manifold embedded in the high-dimensional observation space (the space of all possible images). The main contribution of our work is represented by a Supervised Laplacian Eigemaps (S-LE) algorithm, which exploits the class label information for mapping the original data in the embedded space. Our proposed approach benefits from two important properties: i) it is discriminative, and ii) it adaptively selects the neighbors of a sample without using any predefined neighborhood size. Experiments were conducted on four face databases and the results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms many linear and non-linear embedding techniques. Although we've focused on the face recognition problem, the proposed approach could also be extended to other category of objects characterized by large variance in their appearance.
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Bogdan Raducanu, & Fadi Dornaika. (2013). Texture-independent recognition of facial expressions in image snapshots and videos. MVA - Machine Vision and Applications, 24(4), 811–820.
Abstract: This paper addresses the static and dynamic recognition of basic facial expressions. It has two main contributions. First, we introduce a view- and texture-independent scheme that exploits facial action parameters estimated by an appearance-based 3D face tracker. We represent the learned facial actions associated with different facial expressions by time series. Second, we compare this dynamic scheme with a static one based on analyzing individual snapshots and show that the former performs better than the latter. We provide evaluations of performance using three subspace learning techniques: linear discriminant analysis, non-parametric discriminant analysis and support vector machines.
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Bogdan Raducanu, & Fadi Dornaika. (2012). A Supervised Non-linear Dimensionality Reduction Approach for Manifold Learning. PR - Pattern Recognition, 45(6), 2432–2444.
Abstract: IF= 2.61
IF=2.61 (2010)
In this paper we introduce a novel supervised manifold learning technique called Supervised Laplacian Eigenmaps (S-LE), which makes use of class label information to guide the procedure of non-linear dimensionality reduction by adopting the large margin concept. The graph Laplacian is split into two components: within-class graph and between-class graph to better characterize the discriminant property of the data. Our approach has two important characteristics: (i) it adaptively estimates the local neighborhood surrounding each sample based on data density and similarity and (ii) the objective function simultaneously maximizes the local margin between heterogeneous samples and pushes the homogeneous samples closer to each other.
Our approach has been tested on several challenging face databases and it has been conveniently compared with other linear and non-linear techniques, demonstrating its superiority. Although we have concentrated in this paper on the face recognition problem, the proposed approach could also be applied to other category of objects characterized by large variations in their appearance (such as hand or body pose, for instance.
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Bogdan Raducanu, & Fadi Dornaika. (2014). Embedding new observations via sparse-coding for non-linear manifold learning. PR - Pattern Recognition, 47(1), 480–492.
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.
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Bogdan Raducanu, & Fadi Dornaika. (2011). A Discriminative Non-Linear Manifold Learning Technique for Face Recognition. In Informatics Engineering and Information Science (Vol. 254, pp. 339–353). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: In this paper we propose a novel non-linear discriminative analysis technique for manifold learning. The proposed approach is a discriminant version of Laplacian Eigenmaps which takes into account the class label information in order to guide the procedure of non-linear dimensionality reduction. By following the large margin concept, the graph Laplacian is split in two components: within-class graph and between-class graph to better characterize the discriminant property of the data.
Our approach has been tested on several challenging face databases and it has been conveniently compared with other linear and non-linear techniques. The experimental results confirm that our method outperforms, in general, the existing ones. Although we have concentrated in this paper on the face recognition problem, the proposed approach could also be applied to other category of objects characterized by large variance in their appearance.
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Bogdan Raducanu, & Fadi Dornaika. (2008). Dynamic Vs. Static Recognition of Facial Expressions. In Rabuñal (Ed.), Ambient Intelligence. European Conference (Vol. 5355, 13–25). LNCS.
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Bogdan Raducanu, & Fadi Dornaika. (2009). Natural Facial Expression Recognition Using Dynamic and Static Schemes. In 5th International Symposium on Visual Computing (Vol. 5875, 730–739). LNCS. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: Affective computing is at the core of a new paradigm in HCI and AI represented by human-centered computing. Within this paradigm, it is expected that machines will be enabled with perceiving capabilities, making them aware about users’ affective state. The current paper addresses the problem of facial expression recognition from monocular videos sequences. We propose a dynamic facial expression recognition scheme, which is proven to be very efficient. Furthermore, it is conveniently compared with several static-based systems adopting different magnitude of facial expression. We provide evaluations of performance using Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), Non parametric Discriminant Analysis (NDA), and Support Vector Machines (SVM). We also provide performance evaluations using arbitrary test video sequences.
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Bogdan Raducanu, & Fadi Dornaika. (2012). Pose-Invariant Face Recognition in Videos for Human-Machine Interaction. In 12th European Conference on Computer Vision (Vol. 7584, 566.575). LNCS. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: Human-machine interaction is a hot topic nowadays in the communities of computer vision and robotics. In this context, face recognition algorithms (used as primary cue for a person’s identity assessment) work well under controlled conditions but degrade significantly when tested in real-world environments. This is mostly due to the difficulty of simultaneously handling variations in illumination, pose, and occlusions. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for robust pose-invariant face recognition for human-robot interaction based on the real-time fitting of a 3D deformable model to input images taken from video sequences. More concrete, our approach generates a rectified face image irrespective with the actual head-pose orientation. Experimental results performed on Honda video database, using several manifold learning techniques, show a distinct advantage of the proposed method over the standard 2D appearance-based snapshot approach.
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Bogdan Raducanu, & Fadi Dornaika. (2012). Out-of-Sample Embedding by Sparse Representation. In Structural, Syntactic, and Statistical Pattern Recognition, Joint IAPR International Workshop (Vol. 7626, pp. 336–344). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: A critical aspect of non-linear dimensionality reduction techniques is represented by the construction of the adjacency graph. The difficulty resides in finding the optimal parameters, a process which, in general, is heuristically driven. Recently, sparse representation has been proposed as a non-parametric solution to overcome this problem. In this paper, we demonstrate that this approach not only serves for the graph construction, but also represents an efficient and accurate alternative for out-of-sample embedding. Considering for a case study the Laplacian Eigenmaps, we applied our method to the face recognition problem. Experimental results conducted on some challenging datasets confirmed the robustness of our approach and its superiority when compared to existing techniques.
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