Attribute-Aware Convolutional Neural Networks for Facial Beauty Prediction

Attribute-Aware Convolutional Neural Networks for Facial Beauty Prediction

Luojun Lin, Lingyu Liang, Lianwen Jin, Weijie Chen

Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 847-853. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2019/119

Facial beauty prediction (FBP) aims to develop a machine that automatically makes facial attractiveness assessment. To a large extent, the perception of facial beauty for a human is involved with the attributes of facial appearance, which provides some significant visual cues for FBP. Deep convolution neural networks (CNNs) have shown its power for FBP, but convolution filters with fixed parameters cannot take full advantage of the facial attributes for FBP. To address this problem, we propose an Attribute-aware Convolutional Neural Network (AaNet) that modulates the filters of the main network, adaptively, using parameter generators that take beauty-related attributes as extra inputs. The parameter generators update the filters in the main network in two different manners: filter tuning or filter rebirth. However, AaNet takes attributes information as prior knowledge, that is ill-suited to those datasets merely with task-oriented labels. Therefore, imitating the design of AaNet, we further propose a Pseudo Attribute-aware Convolutional Neural Network (P-AaNet) that modulates filters conditioned on global context embeddings (pseudo attributes) of input faces learnt by a lightweight pseudo attribute distiller. Extensive ablation studies show that the AaNet and P-AaNet improve the performance of FBP when compared to conventional convolution and attention scheme, which validates the effectiveness of our method.
Keywords:
Computer Vision: Biometrics, Face and Gesture Recognition
Computer Vision: Computer Vision