Computer Sciences Colloquium - A Decade of Faces in the Wild

Abstract:

Faces are undoubtedly one of the most rigorously studied object classes in computer vision and recognizing faces from their pictures is one of the classic problems of the field. Fueled by applications ranging from biometrics and security to entertainment and commerce, massive research efforts were directed at this problem from both academia and industry. As a result, machine capabilities rose to the point where face recognition systems now claim to surpass even the human visual system. My own work on this problem began nearly a decade ago. At that time, the community shifted its interests from the (mostly) solved problem of recognizing faces appearing in controlled, high quality images to images taken in the wild, where no control is assumed over how the faces are viewed. In this talk, I will provide my perspectives on this problem and the solutions proposed to solve it. I will discuss the rationale which drove the design of our methods, their limitations, and breakthroughs. In particular, I will show how classical computer vision methods and, surprisingly, elementary computer graphics, work together with cutting edge deep learning in the design of our state of the art face recognition methods. 

Bio:

Tal Hassner received a his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in applied mathematics and computer science from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 2002 and 2006, resp. In 2008 he joined the faculty of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, The Open University of Israel, where he is currently an Associate Professor. Since 2015, he is also a Senior Computer Scientist at the University of Southern California (USC), Information Sciences Institute (ISI) and since 2017 a Visiting Research Associate Professor at the USC Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Systems. Tal's research interests are in computer vision, pattern recognition, and machine learning. In recent years, much of his work focused on processing and understanding face images and videos, with a particular emphasis on face recognition. Tal served in numerous community roles including organizing international workshops and conferences. In particular, he is presently a program co-chair for the 2018 IEEE Winter Conf. on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) and is set to be a program co-chair for the IEEE / CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) in 2021.