Basic idea

This research idea fits in the category of using face bounding boxes to determine identity. The techniques that I know of in this category do one of the following: 1) extract features uniformly throughout the box, 2) extract fiducials on the face, or 3) build a 3D model from an image. There are also face-agnostic techniques which have been successfully applied to recognition.

The idea: perhaps there is hitherto unexploited information in the shape of the face region in the bounding box. For example, a pudgy person could be distinguished from a gaunt person with a segmentation of face from background. Circumstantially supporting evidence: what's outside the face (jawline, hair, etc.) plays a major role in human visual perception of faces (Result 6 of Sinha et al.).

In this blog, we'll explore the "external face information" idea (scare quotes appropriate), including figuring out more precisely what it should mean and what other people have done. We'll do some literature reviews to start off, propose some ideas if they come, maybe run some tests, and generally play it by ear.