2021 |
Emeršič, Žiga; Sušanj, Diego; Meden, Blaž; Peer, Peter; Štruc, Vitomir ContexedNet : Context-Aware Ear Detection in Unconstrained Settings Članek v strokovni reviji V: IEEE Access, str. 1–17, 2021, ISSN: 2169-3536. Povzetek | Povezava | BibTeX | Oznake: biometrics, contextual information, deep leraning, ear detection, ear recognition, ear segmentation, neural networks, segmentation @article{ContexedNet_Emersic_2021,Ear detection represents one of the key components of contemporary ear recognition systems. While significant progress has been made in the area of ear detection over recent years, most of the improvements are direct results of advances in the field of visual object detection. Only a limited number of techniques presented in the literature are domain--specific and designed explicitly with ear detection in mind. In this paper, we aim to address this gap and present a novel detection approach that does not rely only on general ear (object) appearance, but also exploits contextual information, i.e., face--part locations, to ensure accurate and robust ear detection with images captured in a wide variety of imaging conditions. The proposed approach is based on a Context--aware Ear Detection Network (ContexedNet) and poses ear detection as a semantic image segmentation problem. ContexedNet consists of two processing paths: 1) a context--provider that extracts probability maps corresponding to the locations of facial parts from the input image, and 2) a dedicated ear segmentation model that integrates the computed probability maps into a context--aware segmentation-based ear detection procedure. ContexedNet is evaluated in rigorous experiments on the AWE and UBEAR datasets and shown to ensure competitive performance when evaluated against state--of--the--art ear detection models from the literature. Additionally, because the proposed contextualization is model agnostic, it can also be utilized with other ear detection techniques to improve performance. |
2018 |
Emeršič, Žiga; Gabriel, Luka; Štruc, Vitomir; Peer, Peter Convolutional encoder--decoder networks for pixel-wise ear detection and segmentation Članek v strokovni reviji V: IET Biometrics, vol. 7, no. 3, str. 175–184, 2018. Povzetek | Povezava | BibTeX | Oznake: annotated web ears, AWE, biometrics, ear, ear detection, pixel-wise detection, segmentation @article{emervsivc2018convolutional,Object detection and segmentation represents the basis for many tasks in computer and machine vision. In biometric recognition systems the detection of the region-of-interest (ROI) is one of the most crucial steps in the processing pipeline, significantly impacting the performance of the entire recognition system. Existing approaches to ear detection, are commonly susceptible to the presence of severe occlusions, ear accessories or variable illumination conditions and often deteriorate in their performance if applied on ear images captured in unconstrained settings. To address these shortcomings, we present a novel ear detection technique based on convolutional encoder-decoder networks (CEDs). We formulate the problem of ear detection as a two-class segmentation problem and design and train a CED-network architecture to distinguish between image-pixels belonging to the ear and the non-ear class. Unlike competing techniques, our approach does not simply return a bounding box around the detected ear, but provides detailed, pixel-wise information about the location of the ears in the image. Experiments on a dataset gathered from the web (a.k.a. in the wild) show that the proposed technique ensures good detection results in the presence of various covariate factors and significantly outperforms competing methods from the literature. |
Objave
2021 |
ContexedNet : Context-Aware Ear Detection in Unconstrained Settings Članek v strokovni reviji V: IEEE Access, str. 1–17, 2021, ISSN: 2169-3536. |
2018 |
Convolutional encoder--decoder networks for pixel-wise ear detection and segmentation Članek v strokovni reviji V: IET Biometrics, vol. 7, no. 3, str. 175–184, 2018. |