Prof. Alice J. O’Toole from the University of Texas at Dallas delivered a Distinguished Lecture on Deep Learning and CNN at CRISP, Germany on June 3rd.
The lecture entitled: „Turning a face recognition black box white: Understanding what deep convolutional neural networks learn about faces“ covered real-world face recognition applications and its requirements to perceive the uniqueness of a face across multiple, variable images. Deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) accomplish this and can be analysed in a multidimensional “face space”. Alice illustrated, how she examined the organization of viewpoint, illumination, gender, and identity in this space. Specifically, we probing a DCNN trained with in-the-wild images with an in-the-lab dataset consisting of rendered images from 3D laser scans of faces. She showed that DCNNs create a highly organized face similarity structure in which identities and images coexist. Natural image variation is organized in this hierarchy, with face identity nested under gender, illumination under identity, and viewpoint under illumination. To examine identity, she caricatured faces and found that identification accuracy increased with caricaturing. Mimicking human perception, DCNN caricature representations “resembled” their veridical counterparts. Caricaturing also minimized illumination and viewpoint representational variation. DCNNs offer a theoretical framework that reconciles decades of behavioral and neural results that emphasized either the image or the object/face in representations, without understanding how a neural code could seamlessly accommodate both.
About Alice J. O’Toole
Alice J O’Toole is a Professor at the University of Texas at Dallas in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Her research interests include human perception, memory and cognition. In 2007, she was named Aage and Margareta Møller Endowed Professor. She currently serves as an Associate Editor of Psychological Science and the British Journal of Psychology and has served as Program Chair of the 2017 IEEE Meeting on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition. Alice received a BA in Psychology (1983) from The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC, and a MS (1985) and PhD (1988) in Experimental Psychology from Brown University, Providence, RI. Dr. O’Toole has been the recipient of an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship, and has received research funding from NIH, NIMH, DARPA, IARPA, and the National Institute of Justice.