Portrait Interpretation and a Benchmark

TL;DR

This paper introduces Portrait Interpretation, a new multi-task learning framework with a large dataset, aiming to comprehensively perceive human portraits by integrating appearance, posture, and emotion recognition.

Contribution

It defines a novel portrait interpretation task, constructs a large diverse dataset, and proposes a baseline model and metric for systematic perception of portraits.

Findings

Multi-task learning improves portrait perception accuracy.

The dataset covers diverse human attributes from movies.

Combining related tasks benefits overall performance.

Abstract

We propose a task we name Portrait Interpretation and construct a dataset named Portrait250K for it. Current researches on portraits such as human attribute recognition and person re-identification have achieved many successes, but generally, they: 1) may lack mining the interrelationship between various tasks and the possible benefits it may bring; 2) design deep models specifically for each task, which is inefficient; 3) may be unable to cope with the needs of a unified model and comprehensive perception in actual scenes. In this paper, the proposed portrait interpretation recognizes the perception of humans from a new systematic perspective. We divide the perception of portraits into three aspects, namely Appearance, Posture, and Emotion, and design corresponding sub-tasks for each aspect. Based on the framework of multi-task learning, portrait interpretation requires a comprehensive description of static attributes and dynamic states of portraits. To invigorate research on this new task, we construct a new dataset that contains 250,000 images labeled with identity, gender, age, physique, height, expression, and posture of the whole body and arms. Our dataset is collected from 51 movies, hence covering extensive diversity. Furthermore, we focus on representation learning for portrait interpretation and propose a baseline that reflects our systematic perspective. We also propose an appropriate metric for this task. Our experimental results demonstrate that combining the tasks related to portrait interpretation can yield benefits. Code and dataset will be made public.