CMU talk: The Inner Workings of face Processing: From human to computer perception and back

CMU VASC Seminar
Monday, October 12
2pm-3pm

The Inner Workings of face Processing: From human to computer perception and back
Aleix Martinez
Ohio State University

Abstract:
Faces and emotions shape our daily life in many different ways. We are so intrigued about such effects that writers, poets and painters have been depicting and portraying them for centuries. Why does the male character in Wood's "American Gothic" seem sad? Why do kids elongate their faces when they are upset? Why do some people always seem angry? Why do we recognize identity from faces so easily? Why is it so hard to learn non-manuals (i.e., facial expressions of grammar) in sign languages, when native signers do this effortlessly? In short, what are the dimensions of our computational (cognitive) space responsible for these face processing tasks? If we are to understand why things appear as they do and how cognitive disorders in Autism, schizophrenia and Huntington’s disease develop, we need to define how the brain codes and interpreters faces, emotions and grammar. This is also important for the design of technology – as devices need to interact with us. In this talk, I will outline the research framework I use to study face perception and the related topics of emotion and grammar. This consists of a multidisciplinary approach in cognitive science, including psychophysical studies and the design of computer algorithms for the analysis of face images. We will review the big questions about this computational space. In doing so, we will see that the ability of human observers to process face images is truly remarkable, suggesting that some abstract, yet simple representation that is unaffected by a large number of image transformations is at work. We will summarize our current understanding of this representation.

Bio:
Aleix M. Martinez is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The Ohio State University (OSU), where he is the founder and director of the Computational Biology and Cognitive Science Lab. He is also affiliated with the Department of Biomedical Engineering and to the Center for Cognitive Science. Prior to joining OSU, he was affiliated with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Purdue University and with the Sony Computer Science Lab. He serves as an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and of Image and Vision Computing and has been an area chair of CVPR. Aleix has spent his time wondering why he is such a bad face recognizer and why people attribute social labels to faces of unknown individuals. His other areas of interest are learning, vision and linguistics.