Xiaoming Liu

MSU Foundation Professor Michigan State University

  • East Lansing MI

Xiaoming Liu works on computer vision, machine learning, and biometrics, especially on face related analysis.

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Michigan State University

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Spotlight

2 min

Detecting deepfakes: MSU expert can discuss Facebook research collaboration

Deepfakes, they’re interesting, entertaining and also deeply concerning for security officials. And as the technology behind deepfakes continues to refine and improve its delivery – researchers and social media giants are reacting quickly and trying to keep pace with the potentially troublesome technology. Recently, CNBC featured the work of MSU’s Xiaoming Liu and researchers from Facebook, who developed a model that pulls back the curtain of who is creating deepfakes. Artificial intelligence researchers at Facebook and Michigan State University say they have developed a new piece of software that can reveal where so-called deepfakes have come from. Deepfakes are videos that have been digitally altered in some way with AI. They’ve become increasingly realistic in recent years, making it harder for humans to determine what’s real on the internet, and indeed Facebook, and what’s not. The Facebook researchers claim that their AI software — announced on Wednesday — can be trained to establish if a piece of media is a deepfake or not from a still image or a single video frame. Not only that, they say the software can also identify the AI that was used to create the deepfake in the first place, no matter how novel the technique. Tal Hassner, an applied research lead at Facebook, told CNBC that it’s possible to train AI software “to look at the photo and tell you with a reasonable degree of accuracy what is the design of the AI model that generated that photo.” The research comes after MSU realized last year that it’s possible to determine what model of camera was used to take a specific photo — Hassner said that Facebook’s work with MSU builds on this. June 16 – CNBC There’s a lot to learn about deepfakes, the concerns about the technology and what can be done to ensure the technology doesn’t create havoc or confusion in elections or any other form of communications – and if you are a journalist looking to know more, our experts are here to help. Xiaoming Liu a MSU Foundation Professor and is an expert when it comes on computer vision, machine learning, and biometrics, especially on face related analysis. Dr. Liu is available to speak to media about deep-fake technology – simply click on his icon now to arrange an interview today.

Xiaoming Liu

Biography

Xiaoming Liu earned his Ph.D degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 2004. He received a B.E. degree from Beijing Information Technology Institute, China and a M.E. degree from Zhejiang University, China in 1997 and 2000 respectively, both in Computer Science. Prior to joining MSU, he was a research scientist at the Computer Vision Laboratory of GE Global Research. His research interests include computer vision, pattern recognition, machine learning, biometrics, human computer interface, etc.

Industry Expertise

Computer Software
Computer Hardware
Biotechnology

Areas of Expertise

Human Computer Interfaces
Deepfake Detection
Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Computer Vision
Biometrics

Accomplishments

MSU Foundation Professor

2021

Fellow of International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR)

2020, for contributions to face and video analysis

Finalist of the CVPR 2019 Best Paper Award

2019, for students’ work of “Deep Tree Learning for Zero-shot Face Anti-Spoofing”

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Education

Zhejiang University

M.S.

Computer Science and Engineering

2000

Carnegie Mellon University

Ph.D.

Electrical and Computer Engineering

2004

Beijing Information Technology Institute

B.A.

Computer Science and Engineering

1997

Affiliations

  • IEEE Transactions on Biometrics, Behavior, and Identity Science (T-BIOM) Special Issue on Trustworthy Biometrics : Guest Editor, 2020 - 2022
  • Corresponding Expert of Frontiers of Information Technology & Electronic Engineering : Guest Editor, 2019 - 2022
  • Engineering Journal Special Issue on Artificial Intelligence 2021 : Guest Editor, 2021
  • Pattern Recognition Letter Special Issue on Biometric Presentation Attacks: handcrafted features versus deep learning approaches : Guest Editor, 2019
  • ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications (TOMM) Special Issue on Face Analysis for Applications : Guest Editor, 2018 - 2019
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News

MSU, Facebook develop research model to fight deepfakes

MSU Today  online

2021-06-16

“Our method will facilitate deepfake detection and tracing in real-world settings where the deepfake image itself is often the only information detectors have to work with,” said Xiaoming Liu, MSU Foundation Professor of computer science. “It’s important to go beyond current methods of image attribution because a deepfake could be created using a generative model that the current detector has not seen during its training.”

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Facebook scientists say they can now tell where deepfakes have come from

CNBC  online

2021-06-16

Schick questioned whether Facebook’s tool would work on the latter, adding that “there can never be a one size fits all detector.” But Xiaoming Liu, Facebook’s collaborator at Michigan State, said the work has “been evaluated and validated on both cases of deepfakes.” Liu added that the “performance might be lower” in cases where the manipulation only happens in a very small area.

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Facebook says it’s made a big leap forward in detecting deepfakes

Fortune  online

2021-06-16

Hassner says the research took inspiration from prior work by a Michigan State computer scientist who collaborated on the project, Xiaoming Liu. Liu had studied the subtle differences between images taken with different brands and kinds of digital cameras. He built machine-learning systems that could analyze images and determine, with a high degree of accuracy, the type of camera used to take that particular picture.

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Event Appearances

On the Accuracy, Vulnerability, and Biasness of Face Recognition, The 15th Chinese Conference on Biometrics Recognition (CCBR)

The 15th Chinese Conference on Biometrics Recognition (CCBR), Shanghai, China  Virtual

2021-09-11

Monocular Video-based 3D Perception for Autonomous Driving

7th Tech.AD USA conference 2020, Detroit MI  Virtual

2020-11-17

3D Perception for Autonomous Driving: Research and Education

Southern University of Science & Technology, Shenzhen, China  Virtual

2020-11-13

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Research Focus

Areas :

Computer Vision, Pattern Recognition, Image and Video Processing, Machine Learning, Human Computer Interface, Medical Image Analysis, Multimedia Retrieval.

Patents

Visual analytics system for convolutional neural network based classifiers

US10984054B2

2021-04-20

A visual analytics method and system is disclosed for visualizing an operation of an image classification model having at least one convolutional neural network layer. The image classification model classifies sample images into one of a predefined set of possible classes. The visual analytics method determines a unified ordering of the predefined set of possible classes based on a similarity hierarchy such that classes that are similar to one another are clustered together in the unified ordering. The visual analytics method displays various graphical depictions, including a class hierarchy viewer, a confusion matrix, and a response map. In each case, the elements of the graphical depictions are arranged in accordance with the unified ordering. Using the method, a user a better able to understand the training process of the model, diagnose the separation power of the different feature detectors of the model, and improve the architecture of the model.

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Disentangled representation learning generative adversarial network for pose-invariant face recognition

US20200265219A1

2020-08-20

A system and method for identifying a subject using imaging are provided. In some aspects, the method includes receiving an image depicting a subject to be identified, and applying a trained Disentangled Representation learning-Generative Adversarial Network (DR-GAN) to the image to generate an identity representation of the subject, wherein the DR-GAN comprises a discriminator and a generator having at least one of an encoder and a decoder. The method also includes identifying the subject using the identity representation, and generating a report indicative of the subject identified.

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Research Grants

Intelligent Diagnosis for Machine and Human-Centric Adversaries,” DARPA Reverse Engineering of Deceptions (RED) program

Northeastern University

2020-11-01

Principal Investigator

Face manipulation detection

Facebook

2020-06-01

Principal Investigator

SCH: INT: Collaborative Research: Unobtrusive sensing and motivational feedback for family wellness

National Science Foundation

2019-08-01

Principal Investigator

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Journal Articles

Radar-Camera Pixel Depth Association for Depth Completion

arXiv preprint

Yunfei Long, Daniel Morris, Xiaoming Liu, Marcos Castro, Punarjay Chakravarty, Praveen Narayanan

2021

While radar and video data can be readily fused at the detection level, fusing them at the pixel level is potentially more beneficial. This is also more challenging in part due to the sparsity of radar, but also because automotive radar beams are much wider than a typical pixel combined with a large baseline between camera and radar, which results in poor association between radar pixels and color pixel. A consequence is that depth completion methods designed for LiDAR and video fare poorly for radar and video. Here we propose a radar-to-pixel association stage which learns a mapping from radar returns to pixels. This mapping also serves to densify radar returns. Using this as a first stage, followed by a more traditional depth completion method, we are able to achieve image-guided depth completion with radar and video. We demonstrate performance superior to camera and radar alone on the nuScenes dataset. Our source code is available at this https URL.

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Riggable 3D Face Reconstruction via In-Network Optimization

arXiv preprint

Ziqian Bai, Zhaopeng Cui, Xiaoming Liu, Ping Tan

2021

This paper presents a method for riggable 3D face reconstruction from monocular images, which jointly estimates a personalized face rig and per-image parameters including expressions, poses, and illuminations. To achieve this goal, we design an end-to-end trainable network embedded with a differentiable in-network optimization. The network first parameterizes the face rig as a compact latent code with a neural decoder, and then estimates the latent code as well as per-image parameters via a learnable optimization. By estimating a personalized face rig, our method goes beyond static reconstructions and enables downstream applications such as video retargeting. In-network optimization explicitly enforces constraints derived from the first principles, thus introduces additional priors than regression-based methods. Finally, data-driven priors from deep learning are utilized to constrain the ill-posed monocular setting and ease the optimization difficulty. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves SOTA reconstruction accuracy, reasonable robustness and generalization ability, and supports standard face rig applications.

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Depth Completion with Twin Surface Extrapolation at Occlusion Boundaries

arXiv preprint

Saif Imran, Xiaoming Liu, Daniel Morris

2021

Depth completion starts from a sparse set of known depth values and estimates the unknown depths for the remaining image pixels. Most methods model this as depth interpolation and erroneously interpolate depth pixels into the empty space between spatially distinct objects, resulting in depth-smearing across occlusion boundaries. Here we propose a multi-hypothesis depth representation that explicitly models both foreground and background depths in the difficult occlusion-boundary regions. Our method can be thought of as performing twin-surface extrapolation, rather than interpolation, in these regions. Next our method fuses these extrapolated surfaces into a single depth image leveraging the image data. Key to our method is the use of an asymmetric loss function that operates on a novel twin-surface representation. This enables us to train a network to simultaneously do surface extrapolation and surface fusion. We characterize our loss function and compare with other common losses. Finally, we validate our method on three different datasets; KITTI, an outdoor real-world dataset, NYU2, indoor real-world depth dataset and Virtual KITTI, a photo-realistic synthetic dataset with dense groundtruth, and demonstrate improvement over the state of the art.

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