Figure 2: A probabilistic model of pose and illumination
variations. The ellipsoid in the middle represents frontal
images with all possible illuminations, lying closely on a
low-dimensional subspace. As the viewpoint changes from
a right-profile to a left-profile pose, the ellipsoid is trans-
ported continuously along a nonlinear manifold. We model
this nonlinear variation with a geometric warping of images.
If the pose change is moderate, we can learn a gen-
erative model by geometrically registering the multi-
view images and probabilistically combining them to
estimate the unknown latent image. Such generative
models have been proposed for the super-resolution
problem (Hardie et al., 1997; Tipping and Bishop,
2002; Capel and Zisserman, 2003). However, previ-
ous work considers only a single latent image rather
than a latent subspace, and therefore can handle only
one-dimensional illumination changes and not the full
range of illumination variations from arbitrary light
sources.
In this paper we model the simultaneous change
of pose and illumination of a person’s face by a
novel “warped subspace model.” Image variations
due to illumination change at a fixed pose are cap-
tured by a low-dimensional illumination subspace;
and variations due to pose change are approximated
by a geometric warping of images in the subspace.
A schematic of the warped subspace is depicted in
Fig. 2.
1.1 Related Work
Image-based models of faces have been proposed be-
fore. A popular multi-pose representation of images
is the light-field presentation, which models the radi-
ance of light as a function of the 5D pose of the ob-
server (Gross et al., 2002a; Gross et al., 2002b; Zhou
and Chellappa, 2004). Theoretically, the light-field
model provides pose-invariant recognition of images
taken with arbitrary camera and pose when the illu-
mination condition is fixed. Zhou et al. extended the
light-field model to a bilinear model which allows si-
multaneous change of pose and illumination (Zhou
and Chellappa, 2004). However, in practice, the cam-
era pose of the test image has to be known beforehand
to compare it with the pre-computed light-field, which
effectively amounts to knowing the correspondence in
3D model-based approaches. This model is also un-
able to extend to the representation to a novel pose.
In the super-resolution field, the idea of using la-
tent subspaces in generative models has been sug-
gested by (Capel and Zisserman, 2001; Gunturk et al.,
2003). However the learned subspaces reflect mixed
contributions from pose, illumination, subject identi-
ties, etc. In our case the subspace encodes 3D struc-
ture, albedo and the low-pass filtering nature of the
Lambertian reflectance function (Basri and Jacobs,
2003), and the pose change is dedicated to geometric
transforms. Furthermore, we show how to learn the
basis, pose and illumination conditions directly and
simultaneously from a few images of both unknown
pose and illumination. In our method we estimate
the geometric warping variable via a continuous opti-
mization instead of searching over a limited or finite
set of predefined transformations (Hardie et al., 1997;
Frey and Jojic, 1999; Tipping and Bishop, 2002).
The remainder of the paper is organized as fol-
lows. In Sec. 2, we formulate the warped subspace
model in a probabilistic generative framework, and
describe how to jointly estimate the pose and the il-
lumination with a known basis. In Sec. 3, we de-
scribe a maximum a posteriori (MAP) approach to the
learning of a basis as well as the estimation of pose
and illumination simultaneously, and explain how a
prior distribution and efficient optimization can be
employed to learn the model. In Sec. 4, we perform
recognition experiments on real data sets. We con-
clude with discussions in Sec. 5.
2 JOINT ESTIMATION OF POSE
AND ILLUMINATION
In this section we explain the elements of genera-
tive models of images and optimization techniques to
jointly estimate pose and illumination.
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