On Face Segmentation, Face Swapping, and Face Perception

Published in IEEE Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG), Xi'an, China, 2018

Recommended citation: Yuval Nirkin, Iacopo Masi, Anh Tuan Tran, Tal Hassner, and Gerard Medioni. On Face Segmentation, Face Swapping, and Face Perception. IEEE Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG), Xi'an, China, 2018.


Inter-subject swapping. LFW G.W. Bush photos swapped using our method onto very different subjects and images. Unlike previous work, we do not select convenient targets for swapping. Is Bush hard to recognize? We offer quantitative evidence supporting Sinha and Poggio showing that faces and context are both crucial for recognition.

Abstract

We show that even when face images are unconstrained and arbitrarily paired, face swapping between them is actually quite simple. To this end, we make the following contributions. (a) Instead of tailoring systems for face segmentation, as others previously proposed, we show that a standard fully convolutional network (FCN) can achieve remarkably fast and accurate segmentations, provided that it is trained on a rich enough example set. For this purpose, we describe novel data collection and generation routines which provide challenging segmented face examples. (b) We use our segmentations to enable robust face swapping under unprecedented conditions. (c) Unlike previous work, our swapping is robust enough to allow for extensive quantitative tests. To this end, we use the Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) benchmark and measure the effect of intra- and inter-subject face swapping on recognition. We show that our intra-subject swapped faces remain as recognizable as their sources, testifying to the effectiveness of our method. In line with well known perceptual studies, we show that better face swapping produces less recognizable inter-subject results (see, e.g., Fig. 1). This is the first time this effect was quantitatively demonstrated for machine vision systems.

arXiv preprint

BibTeX

Some Results From Our Paper

Our method works under unprecedented conditions, swapping between faces viewed from different poses, expressions, genders, and more, and producing natural looking results. Here are some examples from the paper and supplemental material.


Swapping examples selected from the LFW data set to represent extremely different poses (4,7,8), genders (1,2,7,8), expressions (1,7), ethnicities (1,3,6,8), ages (3-8) and occlusions (1,5).


More swapping examples selected from arbitrary images off the web to demonstrate the extreme conditions our swapping method can handle.

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Copyright 2017, Yuval Nirkin, Iacopo Masi, Anh Tuan Tran, Tal Hassner, and Gerard Medioni