Face recognition project

The challenge in this project is to develop pattern recognition techniques to distinguish facial feature classes such as male/female, smiling/serious, child/teen/adult/senior, glasses/none, hat/none, moustache/none, beard/none, etc., using a supervised learning paradigm.

On the class web page you will find four ascii data files extracted from the Eigenface database. Two of the files, faceR and faceS, contain 99 coefficients for each of 2000 faces. faceR should be used as training data; faceS for testing. Each row contains 100 elements. The first element of each row contains a face number (running from 1223 to 5223); the remaining 99 are coefficients measuring how much that face projects onto the corresponding eigenvector.

The other two files, faceDR and faceDS, corresponding to faceR and faceS, contain ascii descriptors of each face, for example:

 1269 (_sex  male) (_age  teen) (_race white) (_face serious) (_prop '())
 1361 (_sex  male) (_age  child) (_race black) (_face serious) (_prop '(hat ))
 2147 (_sex  male) (_age  adult) (_race white) (_face serious) (_prop '())
 2148 (_sex  female) (_age  adult) (_race white) (_face smiling) (_prop '())
 2456    ...   (_prop '(hat glasses ))
 2473    ...   (_prop '(moustache beard ))
Since this is real world data, some data is missing. Faces 1228, 1808, 4056, 4135, 4136, and 5004 are missing from the database, so coefficients for these faces are all zeros. The corresponding descriptors contain, e.g. 1228 (missing descriptor). In addition there is a ``missing descriptor'' entry for face 1232. Furthermore, some of the descriptors may be wrong; for example there are two female faces described as having moustaches.

You might want to consider detectors which are non-separable: for example, you may need different smile detectors for children and for adults; or different age detectors for smiling and serious faces.

Which feature detectors are separable, and which features require non-separable detectors?

Do the different ages lie on a path through face space? Is the path linear?

Which features are most easily detected? How can you eliminate outliers?

Download the data from here

The RAW images can be downloaded from here.

Addendum

You can now find the mean face and 99 eigenfaces in the Matlab MAT-file ev.mat. The list of images used for training the eigenspace is in train_list.

An example of how you might use this is:

load ev.mat
load faceR

v = faceR(5, 2:100)';
i = eigenfaces'*v + mean_face';
imagesc(reshape(i, 128, 128)'); colormap(gray(256));
which reconstructs image 1227 from its coefficients. In this case, the reconstruction is perfect since 1227 was one of the training images.

To read the RAW images from the raw data use:

fid=fopen('rawdata/1223'); 
I = fread(fid);
imagesc(reshape(I, 128, 128)'); colormap(gray(256));

 


Originally prepared by: Martin Szummer, szummer.NOSPAM@media.mit.edu (remove .NOSPAM suffix before sending)
Last modified by: Ashish Kapoor, ash@media.mit.edu, Oct 31 2002