A Prior-Less Method for Multi-face Tracking in Unconstrained Videos

Abstract

This paper presents a prior-less method for tracking and clustering an unknown number of human faces and maintaining their individual identities in unconstrained videos. The key challenge is to accurately track faces with partial occlusion and drastic appearance changes in multiple shots resulting from significant variations of makeup, facial expression, head pose and illumination. To address this challenge, we propose a new multi-face tracking and re-identification algorithm, which provides high accuracy in face association in the entire video with automatic cluster number generation, and is robust to outliers. We develop a co-occurrence model of multiple body parts to seamlessly create face tracklets, and recursively link tracklets to construct a graph for extracting clusters. A Gaussian Process model is introduced to compensate the deep feature insufficiency, and is further used to refine the linking results. The advantages of the proposed algorithm are demonstrated using a variety of challenging music videos and newly introduced body-worn camera videos. The proposed method obtains significant improvements over the state of the art [51], while relying less on handling video-specific prior information to achieve high performance.