Guest Editorial: The Computational Face

Abstract

The papers in this special section examine the concept of automated face analysis (AFA). AFA has received special attention from the computer vision and pattern recognition communities. Research progress often gives the impression that problems such as face recognition and face detection are solved, at least for some scenarios. Several aspects of face analysis remain open problems, including the implementation of large scale face recognition/detection methods for in the wild images, emotion recognition, micro-expression analysis, and others. The community keeps making rapid progress on these topics, with continual improvement of current methods and creation of new ones that push the state-of-the-art. Applications are countless, including security and video surveillance, human computer/robot interaction, communication, entertainment, and commerce, while having an important social impact in assistive technologies for education and health. The importance of face analysis, together with the vast amount of work on the subject and the latest developments in the field, motivated us to organize a special section on this theme. The scope of the compilation comprises all aspects of face analysis from a computer vision perspective. Including, but not limited to: recognition, detection, alignment, reconstruction of faces, pose estimation of faces, gaze analysis, age, emotion, gender, and facial attributes estimation, and applications among others.