Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG), which aims at measuring heart activities and physiological signals from facial video without any contact, has great potential in many applications (e.g., remote healthcare and affective computing). Recent deep learning approaches focus on mining subtle rPPG clues using convolutional neural networks with limited spatio-temporal receptive fields, which neglect the long-range spatio-temporal perception and interaction for rPPG modeling. In this paper, we propose two end-to-end video transformer based architectures, namely PhysFormer and PhysFormer++, to adaptively aggregate both local and global spatio-temporal features for rPPG representation enhancement. As key modules in PhysFormer, the temporal difference transformers first enhance the quasi-periodic rPPG features with temporal difference guided global attention, and then refine the local spatio-temporal representation against interference. To better exploit the temporal contextual and periodic rPPG clues, we also extend the PhysFormer to the two-pathway SlowFast based PhysFormer++ with temporal difference periodic and cross-attention transformers. Furthermore, we propose the label distribution learning and a curriculum learning inspired dynamic constraint in frequency domain, which provide elaborate supervisions for PhysFormer and PhysFormer++ and alleviate overfitting. Comprehensive experiments are performed on four benchmark datasets to show our superior performance on both intra- and cross-dataset testings. Unlike most transformer networks needed pretraining from large-scale datasets, the proposed PhysFormer family can be easily trained from scratch on rPPG datasets, which makes it promising as a novel transformer baseline for the rPPG community.

Face anti-spoofing (FAS) plays a vital role in securing face recognition systems from the presentation attacks (PAs). As more and more realistic PAs with novel types spring up, it is necessary to develop robust algorithms for detecting unknown attacks even in unseen scenarios. However, deep models supervised by traditional binary loss (e.g., `0' for bonafide vs. `1' for PAs) are weak in describing intrinsic and discriminative spoofing patterns. Recently, pixel-wise supervision has been proposed for the FAS task, intending to provide more fine-grained pixel/patch-level cues. In this paper, we firstly give a comprehensive review and analysis about the existing pixel-wise supervision methods for FAS. Then we propose a novel pyramid supervision, which guides deep models to learn both local details and global semantics from multi-scale spatial context. Extensive experiments are performed on five FAS benchmark datasets to show that, without bells and whistles, the proposed pyramid supervision could not only improve the performance beyond existing pixel-wise supervision frameworks, but also enhance the model's interpretability (i.e., locating the patch-level positions of PAs more reasonably). Furthermore, elaborate studies are conducted for exploring the efficacy of different architecture configurations with two kinds of pixel-wise supervisions (binary mask and depth map supervisions), which provides inspirable insights for future architecture/supervision design.

Micro-expression recognition (MER) has attracted much attention with various practical applications, particularly in clinical diagnosis and interrogations. In this paper, we propose a three-stream convolutional neural network (TSCNN) to recognize MEs by learning ME-discriminative features in three key frames of ME videos. We design a dynamic-temporal stream, static-spatial stream, and local-spatial stream module for the TSCNN that respectively attempt to learn and integrate temporal, entire facial region, and facial local region cues in ME videos with the goal of recognizing MEs. In addition, to allow the TSCNN to recognize MEs without using the index values of apex frames, we design a reliable apex frame detection algorithm. Extensive experiments are conducted with five public ME databases: CASME II, SMIC-HS, SAMM, CAS(ME)2, and CASME. Our proposed TSCNN is shown to achieve more promising recognition results when compared with many other methods.

Face anti-spoofing (FAS) and face forgery detection play vital roles in securing face biometric systems from presentation attacks (PAs) and vicious digital manipulation (e.g., deepfakes). Despite satisfactory performance upon large-scale data and powerful deep models, recent advances in face spoofing and forgery detection approaches usually focus on 1) unimodal visual appearance or physiological (i.e., remote photoplethysmography (rPPG)) cues; and 2) separated feature representation for FAS or face forgery detection. On one side, unimodal appearance and rPPG features are respectively vulnerable to high-fidelity face 3D mask and video replay attacks, inspiring us to design reliable multi-modal fusion mechanisms for generalized FAS. On the other side, there are rich common features across FAS and face forgery detection tasks (e.g., periodic rPPG rhythms and vanilla appearance for bonafides), providing solid evidence to design a joint FAS and face forgery detection system in a multi-task learning fashion. In this paper, we establish the first joint face spoofing and forgery detection benchmark using both visual appearance and physiological rPPG cues. To enhance the rPPG periodicity discrimination, we design a two-branch physiological network using both facial spatio-temporal rPPG signal map and its continuous wavelet transformed counterpart as inputs. To mitigate the modality bias and improve the fusion efficacy, we conduct a weighted batch and layer normalization for both appearance and rPPG features before multi-modal fusion. We also investigate prevalent deep models, feature fusion strategies and multi-task learning configurations for joint face spoofing and forgery detection. We find that the generalization capacities of both unimodal (appearance or rPPG) and multi-modal (appearance+rPPG) models can be obviously improved via joint training on these two tasks. We hope this new benchmark will facilitate the future research of both FAS and deepfake detection communities. The codes will be released at https://github.com/ZitongYu/Benchmarking .

Deep models have shown to be vulnerable to catastrophic forgetting, a phenomenon that the recognition performance on old data degrades when a pre-trained model is fine-tuned on new data. Knowledge distillation (KD) is a popular incremental approach to alleviate catastrophic forgetting. However, it usually fixes the absolute values of neural responses for isolated historical instances, without considering the intrinsic structure of the responses by a convolutional neural network (CNN) model. To overcome this limitation, we recognize the importance of the global property of the whole instance set and treat it as a behavior characteristic of a CNN model relevant to model incremental learning. On this basis: 1) we design an instance neighborhood-preserving (INP) loss to maintain the order of pair-wise instance similarities of the old model in the feature space; 2) we devise a label priority-preserving (LPP) loss to preserve the label ranking lists within instance-wise label probability vectors in the output space; and 3) we introduce an efficient derivable ranking algorithm for calculating the two loss functions. Extensive experiments conducted on CIFAR100 and ImageNet show that our approach achieves the state-of-the-art performance.

Recently, deep learning technique has been widely employed to deal with face super-resolution (FSR) problem. It aims to predict the nonlinear relationship between the low-resolution (LR) face images and corresponding high-resolution (HR) ones, which could recover the high-frequency details from the LR degraded textures. However, either CNN-based or Transformer-based approaches mostly enhance the details by exploiting the relationship of local pixels or patches on LR features, the nonlocal features are not fully taken into account for producing high-frequency textures. To improve the above problem, we design a novel dual-branch module which consists of Transformer and CNN respectively. The Transformer branch extracts multiple scale feature embeddings and explores local and nonlocal self-attention simultaneously. Thus, the parallel self-attention mechanism has superior capabilities to capture the local and nonlocal dependencies on face image in the face reconstruction. Furthermore, the traditional CNNs usually extract features by combining pixels in a local convolutional kernel, it may be not effective to recover lost high-frequency details since the variations of local pixels are not well measured, which is important in recovering vivid edges and contours. To this end, we propose the local variation based attention block on the CNN branch, which could enhance the capabilities by directly extracting features from the variation of neighboring pixels. Finally, the Transformer-branch and CNN-branch are combined together by the modulation block to fuse both nonlocal and local advantages from two branches. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method when compared with state-of-the-art approaches. The source code is available https://github.com/jingang-cv/DBTC .