COLLOQUIUM Department of Computer Science and Engineering University of South Carolina Semi-Supervised Face Alignment for an Image Ensemble Yan Tong Department of Computer Science and Engineering University of South Carolina Date: March 4, 2011 (Friday) Time: 1430-1520 (2:30-3:20pm) Place: Swearingen 2A31 Abstract Face alignment is the process of localizing prominent facial components (eyes, mouth, etc.) from an image and is the foundation for all face-related research such as face recognition and facial expression recognition. Supervised face alignment is prevalent in real-time applications. However, it often requires many training images, each of which must be labeled with a set of landmarks, to work well. In current practice, the labeling process is conducted manually, which is labor-intensive and error-prone. Two semi-supervised least squares congealing approaches were developed to estimate a set of landmarks or curves that describe the shapes of the facial components for a large image ensemble with minimal human intervention. Extensive experiments on facial images show that the proposed labeling methods have achieved much more accurate labeling results than the state of the practice. Yan Tong is an Assistant Professor in the department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of South Carolina. From January 2008 until late 2010, she was a research scientist in the Visualization and Computer Vision Lab of GE Global Research. She received a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, NY in 2007. In the same year, she received the Allen B. DuMont Prize. Her Ph.D. thesis research focused on spontaneous facial activity modeling and understanding through the integration of a probabilistic model and computer vision techniques. At GE Global Research, she was active in the biometric fusion, face modeling and face alignment areas. She is a receiver of the GE Bronze Patent Medallion (2009), the GE Level 3 Award (the second highest level, 2009), and the Biometrics Workshop Best Paper Honorable Mention Award (CVPR 2009). She has published over 20 journal and peer-reviewed conference papers and 4 book chapters. One of her PAMI papers has been cited 57 times. Overall, her publications have been cited over 110 times. Dr. Tong also has 2 US patents pending and 4 disclosures.