Contourlet appearance model for facial age estimation

In this work we aim to study rigorously the facial age estimation in a multiethnic environment with 39 possible combination of four feature normalization methods, two simple feature fusion methods, two feature selection methods, and three face representation methods as Gabor, AAM and LBP. First, Gabor feature is extracted as facial representation for age estimation. Inspired by [3], we further fuse the global Active Appearance Model (AAM) and the local Gabor features as the representation of faces. Combining with feature selection schemes such as Least Angle Regression (LAR) and sequential selection, an advanced age estimation system is proposed on the fused features. Systematic comparative of 39 experiments demonstrate that (1) As a single facial representation, Gabor features surprisedly outperform LBP features or even AAM features. (2) With global/local feature fusion scheme, fused Gabor and AAM or fused LBP and AAM features can achieve significant improvement in age estimation over single feature representation alone.

Hierarchical age estimation with dissimilarity-based classification

In this work we automatically segment the left ventricle (LV) in cardiac MR images in the end-diastole (ED) and end-systole (ES) phases using a novel approach that combines statistical and deterministic deformable models. A 3D Active Appearance Model (AAM) is used to segment the ED phase. The AAM texture model is trained on radial samples from gradient magnitude images to make the fitting process faster and more discriminative. A trained ED-to-ES shape correspondence model is used to map a given ED shape to an ES shape. Once the AAM model converges to a shape in ED, the correspondence model is used to get an approximate ES shape. We segment the LV in the ES phase by first fitting a deformable superquadric to the AAM converged shape (in ED) using data range forces and then tracking the LV using image and data range forces (for the ES shape obtained from correspondence model). We test our approach by performing leave-one-out training on a 35 patient datasets. The data comprises 19 normal patients and 16 patients having heart abnormalities (cardiomyopathy and myocardial infarction). The composition makes it a challenging data collection with significant shape variation. The performance of our method is evaluated by measuring the mismatch between automatically segmented and expert delineated contours using the Mean Perpendicular Distance (MPD) and Dice metrics. The average MPD is 2.6mm for ED and 3.7mm for ES (error mostly towards the apex and base). The average Dice is 0.9 for ED and 0.8 for ES. These results show good potential for clinical use.

Regression-based Active Appearance Model initialization for facial feature tracking with missing frames

Active Appearance Models (AAMs) are generative parametric models that have been successfully used in the past to model faces. Anecdotal evidence, however, suggests that the performance of an AAM built to model the variation in appearance of a single person across pose, illumination, and expression (a Person Specific AAM) is substantially better than the performance of an AAM built to model the variation in appearance of many faces, including unseen subjects not in the training set (a Generic AAM). In this paper, we present an empirical evaluation that shows that Person Specific AAMs are, as expected, both easier to build and more robust to fit than Generic AAMs. Moreover, we show that: (1) building a generic shape model is far easier than building a generic appearance model, and (2) the shape component is the main cause of the reduced fitting robustness of Generic AAMs. We then proceed to describe two refinements to Generic AAMs to improve their performance: (1) a refitting procedure to improve the quality of the ground-truth data used to build the AAM and (2) a new fitting algorithm. For both refinements we demonstrate dramatically improved fitting performance. Finally, we evaluate the effect of these improvements on a combined model construction and fitting task.

Background. The prostate gland is delineated as the clinical target volume (CTV) in treatment planning of prostate cancer. Therefore, an accurate delineation is a prerequisite for efficient treatment. Accurate automated prostate segmentation methods facilitate the delineation of the CTV without inter-observer variation. The purpose of this study is to present an automated three-dimensional (3D) segmentation of the prostate using an active appearance model. Material and methods. Axial T2-weighted magnetic resonance (MR) scans were used to build the active appearance model. The model was based on a principal component analysis of shape and texture features with a level-set representation of the prostate shape instead of the selection of landmarks in the traditional active appearance model. To achieve a better fit of the model to the target image, prior knowledge to predict how to correct the model and pose parameters was incorporated. The segmentation was performed as an iterative algorithm to minimize the squared difference between the target and the model image. Results. The model was trained using manual delineations from 30 patients and was validated using leave-one-out cross validation where the automated segmentations were compared with the manual reference delineations. The mean and median dice similarity coefficient was 0.84 and 0.86, respectively. Conclusion. This study demonstrated the feasibility for an automated prostate segmentation using an active appearance with results comparable to other studies.

Face registration is a challenging problem due in part to the non-rigid nature of human faces. Active Appearance Models (AAMs) have been proposed as a useful technique for face registration in part because they can account for changes in shape. Fitting of AAMs to imagery is typically done using the Gauss-Newton method; however this approach is known to fail when either the initial shape estimate is to far off and/or the appearance model fails to direct search toward a good match. In this paper, we employ Evolution Strategies (ES) to search for a near optimal fit, i.e. set of model parameters, that relate an AAM to a novel face image. In addition, we dramatically reduce the dimensionality of the search problem by analytically determining the optimal texture parameters associated with any given shape. Experimental results reveal that the proposed approach outperforms the standard AAM parameter estimation technique and some of its variants. Further, the difference is statistically significant. Finally, some basic limitations of AAMs are identified using fitness landscape analysis.

Video-based face model fitting using Adaptive Active Appearance Model

Facial age estimation has grasped the attention of numerous researchers in recent times. It is a challenging task as a consequence of illumination, pose variations, occlusion, complex background, facial expression, and facial makeup. Estimating the age of an individual with an arbitrary pose is quite a challenging job because most of the age estimation system focuses on the frontal view. In this paper, a novel framework for multi-view age estimation by amalgamating the local and global features is proposed. A novel texture feature, Median Gradient Ternary Pattern is proposed in this paper. The Pseudo Zernike Moment extracts the shape features and the View-based Active Appearance Model constructs an appearance model from the facial images. Further, all three features are combined into a feature vector by executing feature-level fusion. The dimension of the combined feature is reduced using Principal Component Analysis. Multi-class Support Vector Machine is utilized to divide the images into four poses. For each pose, a Support Vector Regression with RBF kernel is applied to train a model for estimating the actual age of an individual. The proposed methodology is performed on two databases, namely, FG-NET and CACD which showcase eminent performance.

Many age estimation methods have been proposed for various applications such as Age Specific Human Computer Interaction (ASHCI) system, age simulation system and so on. Because the performance of the age estimation is greatly affected by the aging feature, the aging feature extraction from facial images is very important. The aging features used in previous works can be divided into global and local features. As global features, Active Appearance Models (AAM) was mainly used for age estimation in previous works. However, AAM is not enough to represent local features such as wrinkle and skin. Therefore, the research about local features is required. In previous works, local features were generally used to determine age group rather than detailed age, and the comparative studies about various local features extraction methods were not conducted. In this paper, the performances of sobel filter, difference image between original and smoothed image, ideal high pass filter (IHPF), gaussian high pass filter (GHPF), Haar and Daubechies discrete wavelet transform (DWT) are compared for extracting local features and detailed age estimation is performed by Support Vector Regression (SVR) on BERC and PAL aging database. The experimental results show that local features can be used for detailed age estimation and GHPF gives a better performance than other methods.

Robust and accurate segmentation methods are important for the computerized evaluation of medical images. For treatment of rheumatoid arthritis, joint damage assessment in radiographs of hands is frequently used for monitoring disease progression. Current clinical scoring methods are based on visual measurements that are time-consuming and subject to intra and inter-reader variance. A solution may be found in the development of partially automated assessment procedures. This requires reliable segmentation algorithms. Our work demonstrates a segmentation method based on multiple connected active appearance models (AAM) with multiple search steps using different quality levels. The quality level can be regulated by setting the image resolution and the number of landmarks in the AAMs. We performed experiments using two models of different quality levels for shape and texture information. Both models included AAMs for the carpal region, the metacarpals, and all phalanges. By starting an iterative search with the faster, low-quality model, we were able to determine the initial parameters of the second, high-quality model. After the second search, the results showed successful segmentation for 22 of 30 test images. For these images, 70% of the landmarks were found within 1.3 mm difference from manual placement by an expert. The multi-level search approach resulted in a reduction of 50% in calculation time compared to a search using a single model. Results are expected to improve when the model is refined by increasing the number of training examples and the resolution of the models.

A background robust active appearance model using active contour technique

Visual tracking is one of the fundamental problems in computer vision. The pose of an object extracted through consecutive frames has a variety of applications ranging from robot navigation to camera based man-machine interfaces. In this paper we examine the use of Active Appearance Models(AAM) for the task of visual tracking. The original Active Appearance Model is limited to have all points of the model visible in all frames. We introduce a notion of visibility uncertainty for the points in the AAM, removing the above limitation and therefore allowing the object to contain self-occlusions. The visibility uncertainty is easily integrated into the existing AAM framework, keeping model initialization time to a minimum.We have experiments illustrating that the extension allow AAMs to track through self occlusions at near real-time.

Automatic face age estimation is a challenging task due to its complexity owing to genetic difference, behavior and environmental factors, and also the dynamics of facial aging between different individuals. In this paper, we propose a feature fusion method to estimate the face age via SVR, which ensembles global feature from Active Appearance Model (AAM) and the local feature from Gabor wavelet transformation. Our experimental results on UIUC-PAL database show that our proposed method works well.KeywordsAAMGaborage estimationfeature fusionensemble

We use the popular active appearance models (AAM) for extracting discriminative features from images of biological objects. The relevant discriminative features are combined principal component (PCA) vectors from the AAM and texture features from cooccurrence matrices. Texture features are extracted by extending the AAM's with a textural warp guided by the AAM shape. Based on this, texture cooccurrence features are calculated. We use the different features for classifying the biological objects to species using standard classifiers, and we show that even though the objects are highly variant, the AAM's are well suited for extracting relevant features, thus obtaining good classification results. Classification is conducted on two real data sets, one containing various vegetables and one containing different species of wood logs.