Automated Analysis and Synthesis of Facial Actions by Dr. Itır Önal Ertuğrul


Dr. Itır Önal Ertuğrul (Carnegie Mellon University) is going to give a seminar titled "Automated Analysis and Synthesis of Facial Actions". You are all kindly invited.

Location: Conference Room (124), METU Informatics Institute

Time: 28 June 2018, 11:30-12:30


Abstract: Automated analysis of facial actions is a challenging task due to moderate to large head rotation in real-world conditions and differences in the factors of domains such as view angle and resolution. In addition to their automated analysis, synthesis of facial actions has drawn much attention, as it is useful in face data augmentation for emotion recognition. In this talk, I will present 1) a deep approach for multi-label facial action unit detection and its application to assess treatment response in patients treated with deep brain stimulation (DBS) for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD); 2) a capsule-based approach to detect multiple action units from facial images having wide range of head orientations; 3) cross-domain generalizability problems of current facial action unit detection models and possible adversarial domain adaptation solutions; and 4) a kinship synthesis framework, in which facial expression videos of probable children are synthesized from videos of parents.

Biography: Itır Önal Ertuğrul received her B.Sc., M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from Computer Engineering Department at Middle East Technical University in 2011, 2013 and 2017, respectively. She worked as a Research Assistant at Computer Engineering Department, Middle East Technical University between 2011 - 2017. During her Ph.D., she visited Pattern Recognition and Bioinformatics Group at Delft University of Technology as a visiting Ph.D. student between July – September 2016. After her Ph.D., she worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at Affect Analysis Group, University of Pittsburgh. Currently, she is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. Her research interests include affective computing, facial expression analysis and biomedical signal processing. For more information, please see her webpage at http://user.ceng.metu.edu.tr/~itir/