Image-based age estimation aims to predict a person's age from facial images. It is used in a variety of real-world applications. Although end-to-end deep models have achieved impressive results for age estimation on benchmark datasets, their performance in-the-wild still leaves much room for improvement due to the challenges caused by large variations in head pose, facial expressions, and occlusions. To address this issue, we propose a simple yet effective method to explicitly incorporate facial semantics into age estimation, so that the model would learn to correctly focus on the most informative facial components from unaligned facial images regardless of head pose and non-rigid deformation. To this end, we design a face parsing-based network to learn semantic information at different scales and a novel face parsing attention module to leverage these semantic features for age estimation. To evaluate our method on in-the-wild data, we also introduce a new challenging large-scale benchmark called IMDB-Clean. This dataset is created by semi-automatically cleaning the noisy IMDB-WIKI dataset using a constrained clustering method. Through comprehensive experiment on IMDB-Clean and other benchmark datasets, under both intra-dataset and cross-dataset evaluation protocols, we show that our method consistently outperforms all existing age estimation methods and achieves a new state-of-the-art performance. To the best of our knowledge, our work presents the first attempt of leveraging face parsing attention to achieve semantic-aware age estimation, which may be inspiring to other high level facial analysis tasks.

Due to its importance in facial behaviour analysis, facial action unit (AU) detection has attracted increasing attention from the research community. Leveraging the online knowledge distillation framework, we propose the "FAN-Trans" method for AU detection. Our model consists of a hybrid network of convolution and transformer blocks to learn per-AU features and to model AU co-occurrences. The model uses a pre-trained face alignment network as the feature extractor. After further transformation by a small learnable add-on convolutional subnet, the per-AU features are fed into transformer blocks to enhance their representation. As multiple AUs often appear together, we propose a learnable attention drop mechanism in the transformer block to learn the correlation between the features for different AUs. We also design a classifier that predicts AU presence by considering all AUs’ features, to explicitly capture label dependencies. Finally, we make the attempt of adapting online knowledge distillation in the training stage for this task, further improving the model’s performance. Experiments on the BP4D and DISFA datasets demonstrating the effectiveness of proposed method.

This article presents a novel method for face clustering in videos using a video-centralised transformer. Previous works often employed contrastive learning to learn frame-level representation and used average pooling to aggregate the features along the temporal dimension. This approach may not fully capture the complicated video dynamics. In addition, despite the recent progress in video-based contrastive learning, few have attempted to learn a self-supervised clustering-friendly face representation that benefits the video face clustering task. To overcome these limitations, our method employs a transformer to directly learn video-level representations that can better reflect the temporally-varying property of faces in videos, while we also propose a video-centralised self-supervised framework to train the transformer model. We also investigate face clustering in egocentric videos, a fast-emerging field that has not been studied yet in works related to face clustering. To this end, we present and release the first large-scale egocentric video face clustering dataset named EasyCom-Clustering. We evaluate our proposed method on both the widely used Big Bang Theory (BBT) dataset and the new EasyCom-Clustering dataset. Results show the performance of our video-centralised transformer has surpassed all previous state-of-the-art methods on both benchmarks, exhibiting a self-attentive understanding of face videos.

Facial action unit (AU) detection plays an important role in performing facial behavioral analysis of raw video inputs. Overall, there are three key factors that contribute toward the optimal performance of AU detectors: 1) being able to capture local AU-centered features; 2) exploiting the fact that some AUs co-occur with others; and 3) utilizing appearance changes across frames. We briefly review current techniques addressing each factor and discuss the challenges they meet. Given that very few works consider how to effectively and efficiently merge them all into a single framework that can be trained in an end-to-end manner, we propose facial AU detection with face alignment(AUNet), a simple yet strong baseline for landmark-based AU detection. AUNet implements the abovementioned key factors by: 1) using the intermediate layers of a pretrained face alignment model to act as our AU features’ space; 2) optimized to satisfy a correlation constraint, derived from the AU labels, and 3) temporal constraint, derived from variations in the contents of consecutive frames in the input videos. The proposed model, with its three key components, remains simple in nature and aligns with the primary AU detection task. Experiments on several benchmarks show that it substantially improves the AU detector’s accuracy and achieves new state-of-the-art AU detection results on popular benchmarks: BP4D and DISFA. Code is available athttps://github.com/jingyang2017/AU-Net.

Visual face tracking is one of the most important components for face analysis in mobile applications and in video surveillance systems. In this paper, we propose an efficient face tracker called FT-RCNN, short for Face Tracking with Region-based CNN, that is based on the Faster-RCNN framework. A simple yet effective tracking branch is proposed to enable the framework to jointly perform face detection and tracking. To address the problem of insufficient training data for face tracking, we propose a novel pairwise training strategy that enables us to train face tracker by leveraging existing face detection datasets, thus eliminating the need to collect and annotate video data specifically for face tracking. Furthermore, we devise a novel loss function, termed Pair-hard Triplet Cosine Loss, that employs a pair-hard triplet mining strategy to increase the discriminative power of our face tracker. We evaluated the proposed tracker on popular video face datasets including MobiFace, ChokePoint and YouTube Face. The results have shown that FT-RCNN outperforms state-of-the-art face trackers and runs at real-time speed. We plan to release the source code for reproducible results in the future.

Face tracking serves as the crucial initial step in mobile applications trying to analyse target faces over time in mobile settings. However, this problem has received little attention, mainly due to the scarcity of dedicated face tracking benchmarks. In this work, we introduce MobiFace, the first dataset for single face tracking in mobile situations. It consists of 80 unedited live-streaming mobile videos captured by 70 different smartphone users in fully unconstrained environments. Over 95K bounding boxes are manually labelled. The videos are carefully selected to cover typical smartphone usage. The videos are also annotated with 14 attributes, including 6 newly proposed attributes and 8 commonly seen in object tracking. 36 state-of-the-art trackers, including facial landmark trackers, generic object trackers and trackers that we have fine-tuned or improved, are evaluated. The results suggest that mobile face tracking cannot be solved through existing approaches. In addition, we show that fine-tuning on the MobiFace training data significantly boosts the performance of deep learning-based trackers, suggesting that MobiFace captures the unique characteristics of mobile face tracking. Our goal is to offer the community a diverse dataset to enable the design and evaluation of mobile face trackers. The dataset, annotations and the evaluation server will be on https://mobiface.github.io/.