Where is who: Large-scale photo retrieval by facial attributes and canvas layout
Journal
International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
Pages
701-710
ISBN
9781450316583
Date Issued
2012
Author(s)
Abstract
The ubiquitous availability of digital cameras has made it easier than ever to capture moments of life, especially the ones accompanied with friends and family. It is generally believed that most family photos are with faces that are sparsely tagged. Therefore, a better solution to manage and search in the tremendously growing personal or group photos is highly anticipated. In this paper, we propose a novel way to search for face photos by simultaneously considering attributes (e.g., gender, age, and race), positions, and sizes of the target faces. To better match the content and layout of the multiple faces in mind, our system allows the user to graphically specify the face positions and sizes on a query "canvas," where each attribute combination is defined as an icon for easier representation. As a secondary feature, the user can even place specific faces from the previous search results for appearance-based retrieval. The scenario has been realized on a tablet device with an intuitive touch interface. Experimenting with a large-scale Flickr dataset of more than 200k faces, the proposed formulation and joint ranking have made us achieve a hit rate of 0.420 at rank 100, significantly improving from 0.036 of the prior search scheme using attributes alone. We have also achieved an average running time of 0.0558 second by the proposed block-based indexing approach. ? 2012 ACM.
Subjects
block-based indexing; face attributes; face retrieval; touch-based user interface
Type
conference paper