Improving Shadow Suppression for Illumination Robust Face Recognition.

2D face analysis techniques, such as face landmarking, face recognition and face verification, are reasonably dependent on illumination conditions which are usually uncontrolled and unpredictable in the real world. The current massive data-driven approach, e.g., deep learning-based face recognition, requires a huge amount of labeled training face data that hardly cover the infinite lighting variations that can be encountered in real-life applications. An illumination robust preprocessing method thus remains a very interesting but also a significant challenge in reliable face analysis. In this paper we propose a novel model driven approach to improve lighting normalization of face images. Specifically, we propose to build the underlying reflectance model which characterizes interactions between skin surface, lighting source and camera sensor, and elaborate the formation of face color appearance. The proposed illumination processing pipeline enables generation of the Chromaticity Intrinsic Image (CII) in a log chromaticity space which is robust to illumination variations. Moreover, as an advantage over most prevailing methods, a photo-realistic color face image is subsequently reconstructed, which eliminates a wide variety of shadows whilst retaining the color information and identity details. Experimental results under different scenarios and using various face databases show the effectiveness of the proposed approach in dealing with lighting variations, including both soft and hard shadows, in face recognition.

Surface Meshing with Curvature Convergence.

Surface meshing plays a fundamental role in graphics and visualization. Many geometric processing tasks involve solving geometric PDEs on meshes. The numerical stability, convergence rates and approximation errors are largely determined by the mesh qualities. In practice, Delaunay refinement algorithms offer satisfactory solutions to high quality mesh generations. The theoretical proofs for volume based and surface based Delaunay refinement algorithms have been established, but those for conformal parameterization based ones remain wide open. This work focuses on the curvature measure convergence for the conformal parameterization based Delaunay refinement algorithms. Given a metric surface, the proposed approach triangulates its conformal uniformization domain by the planar Delaunay refinement algorithms, and produces a high quality mesh. We give explicit estimates for the Hausdorff distance, the normal deviation, and the differences in curvature measures between the surface and the mesh. In contrast to the conventional results based on volumetric Delaunay refinement, our stronger estimates are independent of the mesh structure and directly guarantee the convergence of curvature measures. Meanwhile, our result on Gaussian curvature measure is intrinsic to the Riemannian metric and independent of the embedding. In practice, our meshing algorithm is much easier to implement and much more efficient. The experimental results verified our theoretical results and demonstrated the efficiency of the meshing algorithm.