We consider the task of automated estimation of facial expression intensity. This involves estimation of multiple output variables (facial action units --- AUs) that are structurally dependent. Their structure arises from statistically induced co-occurrence patterns of AU intensity levels. Modeling this structure is critical for improving the estimation performance; however, this performance is bounded by the quality of the input features extracted from face images. The goal of this paper is to model these structures and estimate complex feature representations simultaneously by combining conditional random field (CRF) encoded AU dependencies with deep learning. To this end, we propose a novel Copula CNN deep learning approach for modeling multivariate ordinal variables. Our model accounts for $ordinal$ structure in output variables and their $non$-$linear$ dependencies via copula functions modeled as cliques of a CRF. These are jointly optimized with deep CNN feature encoding layers using a newly introduced balanced batch iterative training algorithm. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the task of AU intensity estimation on two benchmark datasets. We show that joint learning of the deep features and the target output structure results in significant performance gains compared to existing deep structured models for analysis of facial expressions.
The diversity of facial shapes and motions among persons is one of the greatest challenges for automatic analysis of facial expressions. In this paper, we propose a feature describing expression intensity over time, while being invariant to person and the type of performed expression. Our feature is a weighted combination of the dynamics of multiple points adapted to the overall expression trajectory. We evaluate our method on several tasks all related to temporal analysis of facial expression. The proposed feature is compared to a state-of-the-art method for expression intensity estimation, w…
Capturing Dynamics: The 4D Facial Expression Intensity Dataset
École Centrale Nantes（南特中央理工学院）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；LS2N（LS2N实验室）；Nantes Université（南特大学）；CAPACITÉS SAS（CAPACITÉS公司）；Institut universitaire de France (IUF)（法国大学研究院）；University of Oulu（奥卢大学）
NetEase Fuxi AI Lab（网易伏羲人工智能实验室）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
Facial action unit (AU) intensity is an index to describe all visually discernible facial movements. Most existing methods learn intensity estimator with limited AU data, while they lack generalization ability out of the dataset. In this paper, we present a framework to predict the facial parameters (including identity parameters and AU parameters) based on a bone-driven face model (BDFM) under different views. The proposed framework consists of a feature extractor, a generator, and a facial parameter regressor. The regressor can fit the physical meaning parameters of the BDFM from a single fa…
NetEase Fuxi AI Lab（网易伏羲人工智能实验室）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
The automatic intensity estimation of facial action units (AUs) from a single image plays a vital role in facial analysis systems. One big challenge for data-driven AU intensity estimation is the lack of sufficient AU label data. Due to the fact that AU annotation requires strong domain expertise, it is expensive to construct an extensive database to learn deep models. The limited number of labeled AUs as well as identity differences and pose variations further increases the estimation difficulties. Considering all these difficulties, we propose an unsupervised framework GE-Net for facial AU i…
University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）；PARC, Palo Alto（帕洛阿尔托帕罗奥多研究中心）
Facial expression editing is a challenging task as it needs a high-level semantic understanding of the input face image. In conventional methods, either paired training data is required or the synthetic face resolution is low. Moreover, only the categories of facial expression can be changed. To address these limitations, we propose an Expression Generative Adversarial Network (ExprGAN) for photo-realistic facial expression editing with controllable expression intensity. An expression controller module is specially designed to learn an expressive and compact expression code in addition to the …
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Compared with the image-based static facial expression recognition (SFER) task, the dynamic facial expression recognition (DFER) task based on video sequences is closer to the natural expression recognition scene. However, DFER is often more challenging. One of the main reasons is that video sequences often contain frames with different expression intensities, especially for the facial expressions in the real-world scenarios, while the images in SFER frequently present uniform and high expression intensities. However, if the expressions with different intensities are treated equally, the featu…
Fujitsu Research and Development Center（富士通研究开发中心）；Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd.（富士通株式会社）
The detection of facial action units (AUs) has been studied as it has the competition due to the wide-ranging applications thereof. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for the AU detection from a single input image by grasping the \textbf{c}o-\textbf{o}ccurrence and \textbf{m}utual \textbf{ex}clusion (COMEX) as well as the intensity distribution among AUs. Our algorithm uses facial landmarks to detect the features of local AUs. The features are input to a bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) layer for learning the intensity distribution. Afterwards, the new AU feature continuo…
The intensity estimation of facial action units (AUs) is challenging due to subtle changes in the person's facial appearance. Previous approaches mainly rely on probabilistic models or predefined rules for modeling co-occurrence relationships among AUs, leading to limited generalization. In contrast, we present a new learning framework that automatically learns the latent relationships of AUs via establishing semantic correspondences between feature maps. In the heatmap regression-based network, feature maps preserve rich semantic information associated with AU intensities and locations. Moreo…
This paper tackles the challenging problem of estimating the intensity of Facial Action Units with few labeled images. Contrary to previous works, our method does not require to manually select key frames, and produces state-of-the-art results with as little as $2\%$ of annotated frames, which are \textit{randomly chosen}. To this end, we propose a semi-supervised learning approach where a spatio-temporal model combining a feature extractor and a temporal module are learned in two stages. The first stage uses datasets of unlabeled videos to learn a strong spatio-temporal representation of faci…
Pain is a personal, subjective experience that is commonly evaluated through visual analog scales (VAS). While this is often convenient and useful, automatic pain detection systems can reduce pain score acquisition efforts in large-scale studies by estimating it directly from the participants' facial expressions. In this paper, we propose a novel two-stage learning approach for VAS estimation: first, our algorithm employs Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) to automatically estimate Prkachin and Solomon Pain Intensity (PSPI) levels from face images. The estimated scores are then fed into the pers…
University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；Raiz Invest Limited（Raiz投资有限公司）；Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）
Predicting consumers' purchasing behaviors is critical for targeted advertisement and sales promotion in e-commerce. Human faces are an invaluable source of information for gaining insights into consumer personality and behavioral traits. However, consumer's faces are largely unexplored in previous research, and the existing face-related studies focus on high-level features such as personality traits while neglecting the business significance of learning from facial data. We propose to predict consumers' purchases based on their facial features and purchasing histories. We design a semi-superv…
Facial features deformed according to the intended facial expression. Specific facial features are associated with specific facial expression, i.e. happy means the deformation of mouth. This paper presents the study of facial feature deformation for each facial expression by using an optical flow algorithm and segmented into three different regions of interest. The deformation of facial features shows the relation between facial the and facial expression. Based on the experiments, the deformations of eye and mouth are significant in all expressions except happy. For happy expression, cheeks an…
University of Nottingham（诺丁汉大学）；Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；Samsung AI Center Cambridge（三星剑桥人工智能中心）
Action Units (AUs) are geometrically-based atomic facial muscle movements known to produce appearance changes at specific facial locations. Motivated by this observation we propose a novel AU modelling problem that consists of jointly estimating their localisation and intensity. To this end, we propose a simple yet efficient approach based on Heatmap Regression that merges both problems into a single task. A Heatmap models whether an AU occurs or not at a given spatial location. To accommodate the joint modelling of AUs intensity, we propose variable size heatmaps, with their amplitude and siz…
Existing deep learning based facial landmark detection methods have achieved excellent performance. These methods, however, do not explicitly embed the structural dependencies among landmark points. They hence cannot preserve the geometric relationships between landmark points or generalize well to challenging conditions or unseen data. This paper proposes a method for deep structured facial landmark detection based on combining a deep Convolutional Network with a Conditional Random Field. We demonstrate its superior performance to existing state-of-the-art techniques in facial landmark detect…
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Nearly all existing Facial Action Coding System-based datasets that include facial action unit (AU) intensity information annotate the intensity values hierarchically using A--E levels. However, facial expressions change continuously and shift smoothly from one state to another. Therefore, it is more effective to regress the intensity value of local facial AUs to represent whole facial expression changes, particularly in the fields of expression transfer and facial animation. We introduce an extension of FEAFA in combination with the relabeled DISFA database, which is available at https://www.…
We propose a novel method for automatic pain intensity estimation from facial images based on the framework of kernel Conditional Ordinal Random Fields (KCORF). We extend this framework to account for heteroscedasticity on the output labels(i.e., pain intensity scores) and introduce a novel dynamic features, dynamic ranks, that impose temporal ordinal constraints on the static ranks (i.e., intensity scores). Our experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the art methods for sequence classification with ordinal data and other ordinal regression models. The approac…
Human face exhibits an inherent hierarchy in its representations (i.e., holistic facial expressions can be encoded via a set of facial action units (AUs) and their intensity). Variational (deep) auto-encoders (VAE) have shown great results in unsupervised extraction of hierarchical latent representations from large amounts of image data, while being robust to noise and other undesired artifacts. Potentially, this makes VAEs a suitable approach for learning facial features for AU intensity estimation. Yet, most existing VAE-based methods apply classifiers learned separately from the encoded fea…
Seoul National University of Science and Technology（首尔国立科技大学）
Facial expression in-the-wild is essential for various interactive computing domains. Especially, "Emotional Reaction Intensity" (ERI) is an important topic in the facial expression recognition task. In this paper, we propose a multi-emotional task learning-based approach and present preliminary results for the ERI challenge introduced in the 5th affective behavior analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) competition. Our method achieved the mean PCC score of 0.3254.
Automatic pain intensity assessment has a high value in disease diagnosis applications. Inspired by the fact that many diseases and brain disorders can interrupt normal facial expression formation, we aim to develop a computational model for automatic pain intensity assessment from spontaneous and micro facial variations. For this purpose, we propose a 3D deep architecture for dynamic facial video representation. The proposed model is built by stacking several convolutional modules where each module encompasses a 3D convolution kernel with a fixed temporal depth, several parallel 3D convolutio…
Recife Center for Advanced Studies and Systems - CESAR（累西腓高级研究与系统中心）；Centro de Informática, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco（伯南布哥联邦大学信息学中心）；University of Antwerp - IMEC（安特卫普大学 - 比利时微电子研究中心）；Center for Advanced Methods in Biological Image Analysis（生物图像分析高级方法中心）；California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）
We propose a deep metric learning model to create embedded sub-spaces with a well defined structure. A new loss function that imposes Gaussian structures on the output space is introduced to create these sub-spaces thus shaping the distribution of the data. Having a mixture of Gaussians solution space is advantageous given its simplified and well established structure. It allows fast discovering of classes within classes and the identification of mean representatives at the centroids of individual classes. We also propose a new semi-supervised method to create sub-classes. We illustrate our me…
Department of Engineering “Enzo Ferrari”（恩佐·法拉利工程系）；University of Modena and Reggio Emilia（摩德纳和雷焦艾米利亚大学）；via Vivarelli 10, Modena 41125, Italy（意大利摩德纳维瓦雷利街10号，41125）
In this paper, an adversarial architecture for facial depth map estimation from monocular intensity images is presented. By following an image-to-image approach, we combine the advantages of supervised learning and adversarial training, proposing a conditional Generative Adversarial Network that effectively learns to translate intensity face images into the corresponding depth maps. Two public datasets, namely Biwi database and Pandora dataset, are exploited to demonstrate that the proposed model generates high-quality synthetic depth images, both in terms of visual appearance and informative …
Sharif University of Technology（谢里夫理工大学）；Institute for Studies in Fundamental Sciences (IPM)（基础科学研究所（IPM））
In this paper an accurate real-time sequence-based system for representation, recognition, interpretation, and analysis of the facial action units (AUs) and expressions is presented. Our system has the following characteristics: 1) employing adaptive-network-based fuzzy inference systems (ANFIS) and temporal information, we developed a classification scheme based on neuro-fuzzy modeling of the AU intensity, which is robust to intensity variations, 2) using both geometric and appearance-based features, and applying efficient dimension reduction techniques, our system is robust to illumination c…
Indian Statistical Institute（印度统计研究所）；Jadavpur University（贾达普大学）
In this paper, we present a technique by which high-intensity feature vectors extracted from the Gabor wavelet transformation of frontal face images, is combined together with Independent Component Analysis (ICA) for enhanced face recognition. Firstly, the high-intensity feature vectors are automatically extracted using the local characteristics of each individual face from the Gabor transformed images. Then ICA is applied on these locally extracted high-intensity feature vectors of the facial images to obtain the independent high intensity feature (IHIF) vectors. These IHIF forms the basis of…
Facial Action Coding System consists of 44 action units (AUs) and more than 7000 combinations. Hidden Markov models (HMMs) classifier has been used successfully to recognize facial action units (AUs) and expressions due to its ability to deal with AU dynamics. However, a separate HMM is necessary for each single AU and each AU combination. Since combinations of AU numbering in thousands, a more efficient method will be needed. In this paper an accurate real-time sequence-based system for representation and recognition of facial AUs is presented. Our system has the following characteristics: 1)…
As a fine-grained and local expression behavior measurement, facial action unit (FAU) analysis (e.g., detection and intensity estimation) has been documented for its time-consuming, labor-intensive, and error-prone annotation. Thus a long-standing challenge of FAU analysis arises from the data scarcity of manual annotations, limiting the generalization ability of trained models to a large extent. Amounts of previous works have made efforts to alleviate this issue via semi/weakly supervised methods and extra auxiliary information. However, these methods still require domain knowledge and have n…
Kalyani Government Engineering College（卡利亚尼政府工程学院）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Cognizant Technology Solutions（高知特科技解决方案公司）；Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee（印度理工学院鲁尔基分校）
Facial micro-expressions are sudden involuntary minute muscle movements which reveal true emotions that people try to conceal. Spotting a micro-expression and recognizing it is a major challenge owing to its short duration and intensity. Many works pursued traditional and deep learning based approaches to solve this issue but compromised on learning low-level features and higher accuracy due to unavailability of datasets. This motivated us to propose a novel joint architecture of spatial and temporal network which extracts time-contrasted features from the feature maps to contrast out micro-ex…
Univ. Lille（里尔大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Centrale Lille（里尔中央理工学院）；IMT Lille Douai（里尔杜埃国立高等矿业电信学院）；University of Florence（佛罗伦萨大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
We propose an automatic method for pain intensity measurement from video. For each video, pain intensity was measured using the dynamics of facial movement using 66 facial points. Gram matrices formulation was used for facial points trajectory representations on the Riemannian manifold of symmetric positive semi-definite matrices of fixed rank. Curve fitting and temporal alignment were then used to smooth the extracted trajectories. A Support Vector Regression model was then trained to encode the extracted trajectories into ten pain intensity levels consistent with the Visual Analogue Scale fo…
FX Palo Alto Laboratory（FX帕洛阿尔托实验室）；KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital（KK妇女儿童医院）；Duke-NUS Medical School（杜克-新加坡国立大学医学院）
Managing post-surgical pain is critical for successful surgical outcomes. One of the challenges of pain management is accurately assessing the pain level of patients. Self-reported numeric pain ratings are limited because they are subjective, can be affected by mood, and can influence the patient's perception of pain when making comparisons. In this paper, we introduce an approach that analyzes 2D and 3D facial keypoints of post-surgical patients to estimate their pain intensity level. Our approach leverages the previously unexplored capabilities of a smartphone to capture a dense 3D represent…
Dynamic Facial Expressions Analysis Based Parkinson's Disease Auxiliary Diagnosis
School of Control Science and Engineering, Shandong University, Jinan, 250061, China（控制科学与工程学院，山东大学，济南，250061，中国）；Engineering Research Center of Intelligent Unmanned System, Ministry of Education, China（智能无人系统工程研究中心，教育部，中国）；Department of Geriatric Neurology, Qilu Hospital of Shandong University, Jinan, 250061, China（老年神经内科，山东大学齐鲁医院，济南，250061，中国）；Shandong Inspur Science Research Institute Co., Ltd.（山东浪潮科学研究院有限公司）
University of Nottingham（诺丁汉大学）；Shenzhen University（深圳大学）
Facial actions are spatio-temporal signals by nature, and therefore their modeling is crucially dependent on the availability of temporal information. In this paper, we focus on inferring such temporal dynamics of facial actions when no explicit temporal information is available, i.e. from still images. We present a novel approach to capture multiple scales of such temporal dynamics, with an application to facial Action Unit (AU) intensity estimation and dimensional affect estimation. In particular, 1) we propose a framework that infers a dynamic representation (DR) from a still image, which c…
GraphAU-Pain: Graph-based Action Unit Representation for Pain Intensity Estimation
Department of Computer Science, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK（剑桥大学计算机科学系）；Center for Machine Vision and Signal Analysis, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland（奥卢大学机器视觉与信号分析中心）
Université Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier（图卢兹第三大学-保罗·萨巴蒂埃大学）
This work presents an automatic human gender and age group recognition system based on human facial images. It makes an extensive experiment with row pixel intensity valued features and Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) coefficient features with Principal Component Analysis and k-Nearest Neighbor classification to identify the best recognition approach. The final results show approaches using DCT coefficient outperform their counter parts resulting in a 99% correct gender recognition rate and 68% correct age group recognition rate (considering four distinct age groups) in unseen test images. Det…
Current benchmarks for facial expression recognition (FER) mainly focus on static images, while there are limited datasets for FER in videos. It is still ambiguous to evaluate whether performances of existing methods remain satisfactory in real-world application-oriented scenes. For example, the "Happy" expression with high intensity in Talk-Show is more discriminating than the same expression with low intensity in Official-Event. To fill this gap, we build a large-scale multi-scene dataset, coined as FERV39k. We analyze the important ingredients of constructing such a novel dataset in three a…
The fifth Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) competition has multiple challenges such as Valence-Arousal Estimation Challenge, Expression Classification Challenge, Action Unit Detection Challenge, Emotional Reaction Intensity Estimation Challenge. In this paper we have dealt only expression classification challenge using multiple approaches such as fully supervised, semi-supervised and noisy label approach. Our approach using noise aware model has performed better than baseline model by 10.46% and semi supervised model has performed better than baseline model by 9.38% and the fully…
In this paper, we present our solutions for the 5th Workshop and Competition on Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW), which includes four sub-challenges of Valence-Arousal (VA) Estimation, Expression (Expr) Classification, Action Unit (AU) Detection and Emotional Reaction Intensity (ERI) Estimation. The 5th ABAW competition focuses on facial affect recognition utilizing different modalities and datasets. In our work, we extract powerful audio and visual features using a large number of sota models. These features are fused by Transformer Encoder and TEMMA. Besides, to avoid the possi…
Tianjin University（天津大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Employing deep learning-based approaches for fine-grained facial expression analysis, such as those involving the estimation of Action Unit (AU) intensities, is difficult due to the lack of a large-scale dataset of real faces with sufficiently diverse AU labels for training. In this paper, we consider how AU-level facial image synthesis can be used to substantially augment such a dataset. We propose an AU synthesis framework that combines the well-known 3D Morphable Model (3DMM), which intrinsically disentangles expression parameters from other face attributes, with models that adversarially g…
McMaster University（麦克马斯特大学）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）
This paper presents a subject-independent facial action unit (AU) detection method by introducing the concept of relative AU detection, for scenarios where the neutral face is not provided. We propose a new classification objective function which analyzes the temporal neighborhood of the current frame to decide if the expression recently increased, decreased or showed no change. This approach is a significant change from the conventional absolute method which decides about AU classification using the current frame, without an explicit comparison with its neighboring frames. Our proposed method…
Recognition of human emotions from the imaging templates is useful in a wide variety of human-computer interaction and intelligent systems applications. However, the automatic recognition of facial expressions using image template matching techniques suffer from the natural variability with facial features and recording conditions. In spite of the progress achieved in facial emotion recognition in recent years, the effective and computationally simple feature selection and classification technique for emotion recognition is still an open problem. In this paper, we propose an efficient and stra…
We present a deep learning framework for real-time speech-driven 3D facial animation from just raw waveforms. Our deep neural network directly maps an input sequence of speech audio to a series of micro facial action unit activations and head rotations to drive a 3D blendshape face model. In particular, our deep model is able to learn the latent representations of time-varying contextual information and affective states within the speech. Hence, our model not only activates appropriate facial action units at inference to depict different utterance generating actions, in the form of lip movemen…
University of Oulu（奥卢大学）；University of Canberra（堪培拉大学）
With the progress in automatic human behavior understanding, analysing the perceived affect of multiple people has been recieved interest in affective computing community. Unlike conventional facial expression analysis, this paper primarily focuses on analysing the behaviour of multiple people in an image. The proposed method is based on support vector regression with the combined global alignment kernels (GAKs) to estimate the happiness intensity of a group of people. We first exploit Riesz-based volume local binary pattern (RVLBP) and deep convolutional neural network (CNN) based features fo…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Tianjin University（天津大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Tencent Inc.（腾讯公司）；East China Normal University（华东师范大学）
Attention mechanism has recently attracted increasing attentions in the field of facial action unit (AU) detection. By finding the region of interest of each AU with the attention mechanism, AU-related local features can be captured. Most of the existing attention based AU detection works use prior knowledge to predefine fixed attentions or refine the predefined attentions within a small range, which limits their capacity to model various AUs. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end deep learning based attention and relation learning framework for AU detection with only AU labels, which has no…
Institute of Engineering and Management, Kolkata（加尔各答工程与管理学院）；Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee（印度理工学院鲁尔基分校）；Indian Institute of Technology, Bhubaneswar（印度理工学院布巴内斯瓦尔分校）；National Institute of Technology, Durgapur（杜尔加布尔国立理工学院）
Recently, recognition of gender from facial images has gained a lot of importance. There exist a handful of research work that focus on feature extraction to obtain gender specific information from facial images. However, analyzing different facial regions and their fusion help in deciding the gender of a person from facial images. In this paper, we propose a new approach to identify gender from frontal facial images that is robust to background, illumination, intensity, and facial expression. In our framework, first the frontal face image is divided into a number of distinct regions based on …
