Giovani Chiachia bio photo

Giovani Chiachia

Person-Specific Subspace Analysis for Unconstrained Familiar Face Identification

Abstract : While significant strides have been made in the recognition of faces under controlled viewing conditions, face recognition “in the wild” remains a challenging unsolved problem. Interestingly, while humans are generally excellent at identifying familiar individuals under such conditions, their performance is significantly worse with unfamiliar individuals and groups, leading to the idea that brain may have enhanced or specialized representations of familiar individuals. Inspired by these observations, we explored the use of a number of subspace analysis techniques, applied to various visual representations, to generate person-specific subspaces of “familiar” individuals for face identification. In particular, we introduce a person-specific application of partial least squares (PS-PLS) to generate per-individual subspaces, and show that operating in these subspaces yields state-of-the-art performance on the challenging PubFig83 familiar face identification benchmark. The results underscore the potential importance of incorporating a notion of familiarity into face recognition systems.

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Giovani Chiachia, Nicolas Pinto, William R. Schwartz, Anderson Rocha, Alexandre X. Falcão and David Cox, British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC), 2012