Monday, October 16, 2018
11 AM - 12 PM
EB 3105

Abstract:
We propose a novel face synthesis approach that can generate an arbitrarily large number of synthetic images of both real and synthetic identities. Thus a face image dataset can be expanded in terms of the number of identities represented and the number of images per identity using this approach, without the identity-labeling and privacy complications that come from downloading images from the web. To measure the visual fidelity and uniqueness of the synthetic face images and identities, we conducted face matching experiments with both human participants and a CNN pre-trained on a dataset of 2.6M real face images. To evaluate the stability of these synthetic faces, we trained a CNN model with an augmented dataset contain- ing close to 200,000 synthetic faces. We used a snapshot of this trained CNN to recognize extremely challenging frontal (real) face images. Experiments showed training with the augmented faces boosted the face recognition performance of the CNN.

Biography:
Patrick J. Flynn is Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Notre Dame, and holds the Duda Family Chair in the College of Engineering and a concurrent appointment to the Electrical Engineering faculty. He received the B.S. in Electrical Engineering (1985), the M.S. in Computer Science (1986), and the Ph.D. in Computer Science (1990), all from Michigan State University. Dr. Flynn has held faculty positions at Notre Dame (1990-1991, 2001-present), Washington State University (1991-1998), and The Ohio State University (1998-2001). In 2007-2008, he held a visiting scientist appointment at the National Institute of Standards and Technology during a sabbatical leave. His research interests include computer vision, biometrics, and image processing, and he has advised or co-advised eighteen Ph.D. dissertations, six postdoctoral scholarships, twenty-two M.S. theses, and two B.S. theses. Dr. Flynn is an IEEE Fellow, an IAPR Fellow, and an ACM Distinguished Scientist. He was the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Biometrics Compendium from 2016-2017, and is a past Associate Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Trans. on PAMI, and a past Associate Editor of IEEE TIFS, IEEE TIP, IEEE TPAMI, Pattern Recognition, and Pattern Recognition Letters. He has received outstanding teaching awards from Washington State University and the University of Notre Dame, and Meritorious Service, Golden Core, Certificate of Achievement, and Technical Achievement awards from the IEEE Computer Society.

Host:
Dr. Arun Ross