On Affine Invariant Clustering and Automatic Cast Listing in Movies

Affine-transformation invariant clustering models

We develop a cluster process which is invariant with respect to unknown affine transformations of the feature space without knowing the number of clusters in advance. Specifically, our proposed method can identify clusters invariant under (I) orthogonal transformations, (II) scaling-coordinate orthogonal transformations, and (III) arbitrary nonsingular linear transformations corresponding to models I, II, and III, respectively and represent clusters with the proposed heatmap of the similarity matrix. The proposed Metropolis-Hasting algorithm leads to an irreducible and aperiodic Markov chain, which is also efficient at identifying clusters reasonably well for various applications. Both the synthetic and real data examples show that the proposed method could be widely applied in many fields, especially for finding the number of clusters and identifying clusters of samples of interest in aerial photography and genomic data.

A Coupled Hidden Conditional Random Field Model for Simultaneous Face Clustering and Naming in Videos

For face naming in TV series or movies, a typical way is using subtitles/script alignment to get the time stamps of the names, and tagging them to the faces. We study the problem of face naming in videos when subtitles are not available. To this end, we divide the problem into two tasks: face clustering which groups the faces depicting a certain person into a cluster, and name assignment which associates a name to each face. Each task is formulated as a structured prediction problem and modeled by a hidden conditional random field (HCRF) model. We argue that the two tasks are correlated problems whose outputs can provide prior knowledge of the target prediction for each other. The two HCRFs are coupled in a unified graphical model called coupled HCRF where the joint dependence of the cluster labels and face name association is naturally embedded in the correlation between the two HCRFs. We provide an effective algorithm to optimize the two HCRFs iteratively and the performance of the two tasks on real-world data set can be both improved.

Face Association for Videos Using Conditional Random Fields and Max-Margin Markov Networks

We address the video-based face association problem, in which one attempts to extract the face tracks of multiple subjects while maintaining label consistency. Traditional tracking algorithms have difficulty in handling this task, especially when challenging nuisance factors like motion blur, low resolution or significant camera motions are present. We demonstrate that contextual features, in addition to face appearance itself, play an important role in this case. We propose principled methods to combine multiple features using Conditional Random Fields and Max-Margin Markov networks to infer labels for the detected faces. Different from many existing approaches, our algorithms work in online mode and hence have a wider range of applications. We address issues such as parameter learning, inference and handling false positves/negatives that arise in the proposed approach. Finally, we evaluate our approach on several public databases.