Automatic Face Recognition for Film Character Retrieval in Feature-Length Films

The objective of this work is to recognize all the frontal faces of a character in the closed world of a movie or situation comedy, given a small number of query faces. This is challenging because faces in a feature-length film are relatively uncontrolled with a wide variability of scale, pose, illumination, and expressions, and also may be partially occluded. We develop a recognition method based on a cascade of processing steps that normalize for the effects of the changing imaging environment. In particular there are three areas of novelty: (i) we suppress the background surrounding the face, enabling the maximum area of the face to be retained for recognition rather than a subset; (ii) we include a pose refinement step to optimize the registration between the test image and face exemplar; and (iii) we use robust distance to a sub-space to allow for partial occlusion and expression change. The method is applied and evaluated on several feature length films. It is demonstrated that ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: CVPR
• Authors: Ognjen Arandjelovic, Andrew Zisserman
• Keywords: Computer Vision, CVPR 2005, Face Exemplar, Feature Length Films, Frontal Faces, Pose Refinement Step, Query Faces