Improving Facial Attribute Prediction using Semantic Segmentation
This work addresses the challenge of improving facial attribute recognition and localization for applications like zero-shot learning and human-computer interaction, representing an incremental advancement in the field.
The paper tackled the problem of facial attribute prediction by jointly modeling it with semantic segmentation, using weak supervision to localize attributes and achieving superior results on CelebA and LFWA datasets compared to prior methods.
Attributes are semantically meaningful characteristics whose applicability widely crosses category boundaries. They are particularly important in describing and recognizing concepts where no explicit training example is given, \textit{e.g., zero-shot learning}. Additionally, since attributes are human describable, they can be used for efficient human-computer interaction. In this paper, we propose to employ semantic segmentation to improve facial attribute prediction. The core idea lies in the fact that many facial attributes describe local properties. In other words, the probability of an attribute to appear in a face image is far from being uniform in the spatial domain. We build our facial attribute prediction model jointly with a deep semantic segmentation network. This harnesses the localization cues learned by the semantic segmentation to guide the attention of the attribute prediction to the regions where different attributes naturally show up. As a result of this approach, in addition to recognition, we are able to localize the attributes, despite merely having access to image level labels (weak supervision) during training. We evaluate our proposed method on CelebA and LFWA datasets and achieve superior results to the prior arts. Furthermore, we show that in the reverse problem, semantic face parsing improves when facial attributes are available. That reaffirms the need to jointly model these two interconnected tasks.