We present SensorFlow, a novel image and sensor fusion framework for robust, high-quality video stabilization. We start with sensor-based pre-stabilization that smooths out large-scale camera motion. A new angular velocity domain optimization has been introduced to achieve frame rate in-variance. We then feed the stabilized optical flows into an occlusion-aware 3D CNN that infers dense warp fields to remove residual translation and jitter. To further avoid dis-tortion, we propose a novel masking scheme to determine the disoccluded and dynamic regions in optical flow and in-paint them with spatially smooth flow vectors. Our method is appealing as it shares both the dense warping field's flex-ibility to correct complex motions and the robustness of sen-sor data for arbitrarily challenging scenes. We have vali-dated its effectiveness and demonstrated our solution out-performs state-of-the-art alternatives via extensive ablation studies and quantitative comparisons.

We present a deep neural network (DNN) that uses both sensor data (gyroscope) and image content (optical flow) to stabilize videos through unsupervised learning. The network fuses optical flow with real/virtual camera pose histories into a joint motion representation. Next, the LSTM cell infers the new virtual camera pose, which is used to generate a warping grid that stabilizes the video frames. We adopt a relative motion representation as well as a multi-stage training strategy to optimize our model without any supervision. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first DNN solution that adopts both sensor data and image content for video stabilization. We validate the proposed framework through ablation studies and demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-art alternative solutions via quantitative evaluations and a user study. Check out our video results, code and dataset at our website.

We present Steadiface, a new real-time face-centric video stabilization method that simultaneously removes hand shake and keeps subject's head stable. We use a CNN to estimate the face landmarks and use them to optimize a stabilized head center. We then formulate an optimization problem to find a virtual camera pose that locates the face to the stabilized head center while retains smooth rotation and translation transitions across frames. We test the proposed method on fieldtest videos and show it stabilizes both the head motion and background. It is robust to large head pose, occlusion, facial appearance variations, and different kinds of camera motions. We show our method advances the state of art in selfie video stabilization by comparing against alternative methods. The whole process runs very efficiently on a modern mobile phone (8.1 ms/frame).

This paper presents the first realtime 3D eye gaze capture method that simultaneously captures the coordinated movement of 3D eye gaze, head poses and facial expression deformation using a single RGB camera. Our key idea is to complement a realtime 3D facial performance capture system with an efficient 3D eye gaze tracker. We start the process by automatically detecting important 2D facial features for each frame. The detected facial features are then used to reconstruct 3D head poses and large-scale facial deformation using multi-linear expression deformation models. Next, we introduce a novel user-independent classification method for extracting iris and pupil pixels in each frame. We formulate the 3D eye gaze tracker in the Maximum A Posterior (MAP) framework, which sequentially infers the most probable state of 3D eye gaze at each frame. The eye gaze tracker could fail when eye blinking occurs. We further introduce an efficient eye close detector to improve the robustness and accuracy of the eye gaze tracker. We have tested our system on both live video streams and the Internet videos, demonstrating its accuracy and robustness under a variety of uncontrolled lighting conditions and overcoming significant differences of races, genders, shapes, poses and expressions across individuals.

This paper presents a facial performance capture system that automatically captures high-fidelity facial performances using uncontrolled monocular videos ( e.g ., Internet videos). We start the process by detecting and tracking important facial features such as the nose tip and mouth corners across the entire sequence and then use the detected facial features along with multilinear facial models to reconstruct 3D head poses and large-scale facial deformation of the subject at each frame. We utilize per-pixel shading cues to add fine-scale surface details such as emerging or disappearing wrinkles and folds into large-scale facial deformation. At a final step, we iterate our reconstruction procedure on large-scale facial geometry and fine-scale facial details to further improve the accuracy of facial reconstruction. We have tested our system on monocular videos downloaded from the Internet, demonstrating its accuracy and robustness under a variety of uncontrolled lighting conditions and overcoming significant shape differences across individuals. We show our system advances the state of the art in facial performance capture by comparing against alternative methods.

This paper presents an automatic and robust approach that accurately captures high-quality 3D facial performances using a single RGBD camera. The key of our approach is to combine the power of automatic facial feature detection and image-based 3D nonrigid registration techniques for 3D facial reconstruction. In particular, we develop a robust and accurate image-based nonrigid registration algorithm that incrementally deforms a 3D template mesh model to best match observed depth image data and important facial features detected from single RGBD images. The whole process is fully automatic and robust because it is based on single frame facial registration framework. The system is flexible because it does not require any strong 3D facial priors such as blend shape models. We demonstrate the power of our approach by capturing a wide range of 3D facial expressions using a single RGBD camera and achieve state-of-the-art accuracy by comparing against alternative methods.

This paper challenges the issue of automatic matching between two image sets with similar intrinsic structures and different appearances, especially when there is no prior correspondence. An unsupervised manifold alignment framework is proposed to establish correspondence between data sets by a mapping function in the mutual embedding space. We introduce a local similarity metric based on parameterized distance curves to represent the connection of one point with the rest of the manifold. A small set of valid feature pairs can be found without manual interactions by matching the distance curve of one manifold with the curve cluster of the other manifold. To avoid potential confusions in image matching, we propose an extended affine transformation to solve the nonrigid alignment in the embedding space. The comparatively tight alignments and the structure preservation can be obtained simultaneously. The point pairs with the minimum distance after alignment are viewed as the matchings. We apply manifold alignment to image set matching problems. The correspondence between image sets of different poses, illuminations, and identities can be established effectively by our approach.

The natural expressions play an important role in the daily communication. The efficient and intuitive facial expression editing based on the limited constraints is desirable in the facial animation. In this paper, we present an interactive 3D facial expression editing system with the hierarchical Gaussian process latent variable model (HGPLVM). The hierarchical model incorporates the joint work of the local facial features to produce the natural expressions. To deal with the holistic expression modeling from the local constraints, the inverse mapping between the low-level feature nodes and the high-level facial region nodes is established by the RBF regression model in the latent space. A propagation algorithm is introduced to predict the holistic facial configurations. The experiments demonstrate the 3D facial expressions satisfying the user constraints can be produced efficiently.