Cheng Yaw Low

Cheng Yaw Low, Heejoon Koo, Jaewoo Park et al.

AI-guided classification of ecological families, genera, and species underpins global sustainability efforts such as biodiversity monitoring, conservation planning, and policy-making. Progress toward this goal is hindered by long-tailed taxonomic distributions from class imbalance, along with fine-grained taxonomic variations, test-time spatiotemporal domain shifts, and closed-set assumptions that can only recognize previously seen taxa. We introduce the Open-World Ecological Taxonomy Classification, a unified framework that captures the co-occurrence of these challenges in realistic ecological settings. To address them, we propose TaxoNet, an embedding-based encoder with a dual-margin penalization loss that strengthens learning signals from rare underrepresented taxa while mitigating the dominance of overrepresented ones, directly confronting interrelated challenges. We evaluate our method on diverse ecological domains: Google Auto-Arborist (urban trees), iNat-Plantae (Plantae observations from various ecosystems in iNaturalist-2019), and NAFlora-Mini (a curated herbarium collection). Our model consistently outperforms baselines, particularly for rare taxa, establishing a strong foundation for open-world plant taxonomic monitoring. Our findings further show that general-purpose multimodal foundation models remain constrained in plant-domain applications.

Ivan DeAndres-Tame, Ruben Tolosana, Pietro Melzi et al.

Synthetic data is gaining increasing relevance for training machine learning models. This is mainly motivated due to several factors such as the lack of real data and intra-class variability, time and errors produced in manual labeling, and in some cases privacy concerns, among others. This paper presents an overview of the 2nd edition of the Face Recognition Challenge in the Era of Synthetic Data (FRCSyn) organized at CVPR 2024. FRCSyn aims to investigate the use of synthetic data in face recognition to address current technological limitations, including data privacy concerns, demographic biases, generalization to novel scenarios, and performance constraints in challenging situations such as aging, pose variations, and occlusions. Unlike the 1st edition, in which synthetic data from DCFace and GANDiffFace methods was only allowed to train face recognition systems, in this 2nd edition we propose new sub-tasks that allow participants to explore novel face generative methods. The outcomes of the 2nd FRCSyn Challenge, along with the proposed experimental protocol and benchmarking contribute significantly to the application of synthetic data to face recognition.

Ivan DeAndres-Tame, Ruben Tolosana, Pietro Melzi et al.

Synthetic data is gaining increasing popularity for face recognition technologies, mainly due to the privacy concerns and challenges associated with obtaining real data, including diverse scenarios, quality, and demographic groups, among others. It also offers some advantages over real data, such as the large amount of data that can be generated or the ability to customize it to adapt to specific problem-solving needs. To effectively use such data, face recognition models should also be specifically designed to exploit synthetic data to its fullest potential. In order to promote the proposal of novel Generative AI methods and synthetic data, and investigate the application of synthetic data to better train face recognition systems, we introduce the 2nd FRCSyn-onGoing challenge, based on the 2nd Face Recognition Challenge in the Era of Synthetic Data (FRCSyn), originally launched at CVPR 2024. This is an ongoing challenge that provides researchers with an accessible platform to benchmark i) the proposal of novel Generative AI methods and synthetic data, and ii) novel face recognition systems that are specifically proposed to take advantage of synthetic data. We focus on exploring the use of synthetic data both individually and in combination with real data to solve current challenges in face recognition such as demographic bias, domain adaptation, and performance constraints in demanding situations, such as age disparities between training and testing, changes in the pose, or occlusions. Very interesting findings are obtained in this second edition, including a direct comparison with the first one, in which synthetic databases were restricted to DCFace and GANDiffFace.

Yoon Gyo Jung, Jaewoo Park, Cheng Yaw Low et al.

Periocular biometric, the peripheral area of the ocular, is a collaborative alternative to the face, especially when the face is occluded or masked. However, in practice, sole periocular biometric capture the least salient facial features, thereby lacking discriminative information, particularly in wild environments. To address these problems, we transfer discriminatory information from the face to support the training of a periocular network by using knowledge distillation. Specifically, we leverage face images for periocular embedding learning, but periocular alone is utilized for identity identification or verification. To enhance periocular embeddings by face effectively, we proposeConsistent Knowledge Distillation (CKD) that imposes consistency between face and periocular networks across prediction and feature layers. We find that imposing consistency at the prediction layer enables (1) extraction of global discriminative relationship information from face images and (2) effective transfer of the information from the face network to the periocular network. Particularly, consistency regularizes the prediction units to extract and store profound inter-class relationship information of face images. (3) The feature layer consistency, on the other hand, makes the periocular features robust against identity-irrelevant attributes. Overall, CKD empowers the sole periocular network to produce robust discriminative embeddings for periocular recognition in the wild. We theoretically and empirically validate the core principles of the distillation mechanism in CKD, discovering that CKD is equivalent to label smoothing with a novel sparsity-oriented regularizer that helps the network prediction to capture the global discriminative relationship. Extensive experiments reveal that CKD achieves state-of-the-art results on standard periocular recognition benchmark datasets.

Cheng Yaw Low, Andrew Beng Jin Teoh, Cong Jie Ng

This paper devises a new means of filter diversification, dubbed multi-fold filter convolution (M-FFC), for face recognition. On the assumption that M-FFC receives single-scale Gabor filters of varying orientations as input, these filters are self-cross convolved by M-fold to instantiate a filter offspring set. The M-FFC flexibility also permits cross convolution amongst Gabor filters and other filter banks of profoundly dissimilar traits, e.g., principal component analysis (PCA) filters, and independent component analysis (ICA) filters. The 2-FFC of Gabor, PCA and ICA filters thus yields three offspring sets: (1) Gabor filters solely, (2) Gabor-PCA filters, and (3) Gabor-ICA filters, to render the learning-free and the learning-based 2-FFC descriptors. To facilitate a sensible Gabor filter selection for M-FFC, the 40 multi-scale, multi-orientation Gabor filters are condensed into 8 elementary filters. Aside from that, an average histogram pooling operator is employed to leverage the 2-FFC histogram features, prior to the final whitening PCA compression. The empirical results substantiate that the 2-FFC descriptors prevail over, or on par with, other face descriptors on both identification and verification tasks.