Most of the existing work on automatic facial expression analysis focuses on discrete emotion recognition, or facial action unit detection. However, facial expressions do not always fall neatly into pre-defined semantic categories. Also, the similarity between expressions measured in the action unit space need not correspond to how humans perceive expression similarity. Different from previous work, our goal is to describe facial expressions in a continuous fashion using a compact embedding space that mimics human visual preferences. To achieve this goal, we collect a large-scale faces-in-the-wild dataset with human annotations in the form: Expressions A and B are visually more similar when compared to expression C, and use this dataset to train a neural network that produces a compact (16-dimensional) expression embedding. We experimentally demonstrate that the learned embedding can be successfully used for various applications such as expression retrieval, photo album summarization, and emotion recognition. We also show that the embedding learned using the proposed dataset performs better than several other embeddings learned using existing emotion or action unit datasets.
The task of recognizing human facial expressions plays a vital role in various human-related systems, including health care and medical fields. With the recent success of deep learning and the accessibility of a large amount of annotated data, facial expression recognition research has been mature enough to be utilized in real-world scenarios with audio-visual datasets. In this paper, we introduce Swin transformer-based facial expression approach for an in-the-wild audio-visual dataset of the Aff-Wild2 Expression dataset. Specifically, we employ a three-stream network (i.e., Visual stream, Tem…
We propose a simple yet powerful Landmark guided Generative Adversarial Network (LandmarkGAN) for the facial expression-to-expression translation using a single image, which is an important and challenging task in computer vision since the expression-to-expression translation is a non-linear and non-aligned problem. Moreover, it requires a high-level semantic understanding between the input and output images since the objects in images can have arbitrary poses, sizes, locations, backgrounds, and self-occlusions. To tackle this problem, we propose utilizing facial landmark information explicitl…
Facial expressions are important parts of both gesture and sign language recognition systems. Despite the recent advances in both fields, annotated facial expression datasets in the context of sign language are still scarce resources. In this manuscript, we introduce an annotated sequenced facial expression dataset in the context of sign language, comprising over $3000$ facial images extracted from the daily news and weather forecast of the public tv-station PHOENIX. Unlike the majority of currently existing facial expression datasets, FePh provides sequenced semi-blurry facial images with dif…
The problem of distinguishing identical twins and non-twin look-alikes in automated facial recognition (FR) applications has become increasingly important with the widespread adoption of facial biometrics. Due to the high facial similarity of both identical twins and look-alikes, these face pairs represent the hardest cases presented to facial recognition tools. This work presents an application of one of the largest twin datasets compiled to date to address two FR challenges: 1) determining a baseline measure of facial similarity between identical twins and 2) applying this similarity measure…
Facial feature tracking is an active area in computer vision due to its relevance to many applications. It is a nontrivial task, since faces may have varying facial expressions, poses or occlusions. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing a face shape prior model that is constructed based on the Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBM) and their variants. Specifically, we first construct a model based on Deep Belief Networks to capture the face shape variations due to varying facial expressions for near-frontal view. To handle pose variations, the frontal face shape prior model is incor…
With the growth of popularity of facial micro-expressions in recent years, the demand for long videos with micro- and macro-expressions remains high. Extended from SAMM, a micro-expressions dataset released in 2016, this paper presents SAMM Long Videos dataset for spontaneous micro- and macro-expressions recognition and spotting. SAMM Long Videos dataset consists of 147 long videos with 343 macro-expressions and 159 micro-expressions. The dataset is FACS-coded with detailed Action Units (AUs). We compare our dataset with Chinese Academy of Sciences Macro-Expressions and Micro-Expressions (CAS(…
PainSeeker: An Automated Method for Assessing Pain in Rats Through Facial Expressions
Affiliated Stomatological Hospital, Nanjing Medical University（南京医科大学附属口腔医院）；School of Biological Science and Medical Engineering, Southeast University（东南大学生物科学与医学工程学院）
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.…
Chongqing University（重庆大学）；University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）；Shenzhen University（深圳大学）
In this paper, we introduce a new dataset, the driver emotion facial expression (DEFE) dataset, for driver spontaneous emotions analysis. The dataset includes facial expression recordings from 60 participants during driving. After watching a selected video-audio clip to elicit a specific emotion, each participant completed the driving tasks in the same driving scenario and rated their emotional responses during the driving processes from the aspects of dimensional emotion and discrete emotion. We also conducted classification experiments to recognize the scales of arousal, valence, dominance, …
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Anyang Institute of Technology（安阳工学院）
Facial expression recognition is a challenging task when neural network is applied to pattern recognition. Most of the current recognition research is based on single source facial data, which generally has the disadvantages of low accuracy and low robustness. In this paper, a neural network algorithm of facial expression recognition based on multimodal data fusion is proposed. The algorithm is based on the multimodal data, and it takes the facial image, the histogram of oriented gradient of the image and the facial landmarks as the input, and establishes CNN, LNN and HNN three sub neural netw…
Facial expression recognition (FER) has always been a challenging issue in computer vision. The different expressions of emotion and uncontrolled environmental factors lead to inconsistencies in the complexity of FER and variability of between expression categories, which is often overlooked in most facial expression recognition systems. In order to solve this problem effectively, we presented a simple and efficient CNN model to extract facial features, and proposed a complexity perception classification (CPC) algorithm for FER. The CPC algorithm divided the dataset into an easy classification…
Netease Fuxi AI Lab（网易伏羲人工智能实验室）；University of Houston（休斯顿大学）
Expressions and facial action units (AUs) are two levels of facial behavior descriptors. Expression auxiliary information has been widely used to improve the AU detection performance. However, most existing expression representations can only describe pre-determined discrete categories (e.g., Angry, Disgust, Happy, Sad, etc.) and cannot capture subtle expression transformations like AUs. In this paper, we propose a novel fine-grained \textsl{Global Expression representation Encoder} to capture subtle and continuous facial movements, to promote AU detection. To obtain such a global expression r…
Netease Fuxi AI Lab（网易伏羲人工智能实验室）；Hebei Agricultural University（河北农业大学）；University of Houston（休斯顿大学）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）
Since Facial Action Unit (AU) annotations require domain expertise, common AU datasets only contain a limited number of subjects. As a result, a crucial challenge for AU detection is addressing identity overfitting. We find that AUs and facial expressions are highly associated, and existing facial expression datasets often contain a large number of identities. In this paper, we aim to utilize the expression datasets without AU labels to facilitate AU detection. Specifically, we develop a novel AU detection framework aided by the Global-Local facial Expressions Embedding, dubbed GLEE-Net. Our G…
The subtleness of human facial expressions and a large degree of variation in the level of intensity to which a human expresses them is what makes it challenging to robustly classify and generate images of facial expressions. Lack of good quality data can hinder the performance of a deep learning model. In this article, we have proposed a Facial Expression Generation method for Meta-Humans (FExGAN-Meta) that works robustly with the images of Meta-Humans. We have prepared a large dataset of facial expressions exhibited by ten Meta-Humans when placed in a studio environment and then we have eval…
Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence (CARAI)（人工智能应用研究中心 (CARAI)）
Recent advances in facial expression synthesis have shown promising results using diverse expression representations including facial action units. Facial action units for an elaborate facial expression synthesis need to be intuitively represented for human comprehension, not a numeric categorization of facial action units. To address this issue, we utilize human-friendly approach: use of natural language where language helps human grasp conceptual contexts. In this paper, therefore, we propose a new facial expression synthesis model from language-based facial expression description. Our metho…
Fudan University（复旦大学）；Ping An OneConnect（平安金融壹账通）
The recent research of facial expression recognition has made a lot of progress due to the development of deep learning technologies, but some typical challenging problems such as the variety of rich facial expressions and poses are still not resolved. To solve these problems, we develop a new Facial Expression Recognition (FER) framework by involving the facial poses into our image synthesizing and classification process. There are two major novelties in this work. First, we create a new facial expression dataset of more than 200k images with 119 persons, 4 poses and 54 expressions. To our kn…
Centre de Recherche en Informatique Signal et Automatique de Lille（里尔信息、信号与自动化研究中心）；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校）；ISEN Lille（里尔高等电子与数字学院）；Yncrea Hauts-de-France（上法兰西Yncrea工程师院校联盟）
Although much progress has been made in the facial expression analysis field, facial occlusions are still challenging. The main innovation brought by this contribution consists in exploiting the specificities of facial movement propagation for recognizing expressions in presence of important occlusions. The movement induced by an expression extends beyond the movement epicenter. Thus, the movement occurring in an occluded region propagates towards neighboring visible regions. In presence of occlusions, per expression, we compute the importance of each unoccluded facial region and we construct …
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…
Exp-Graph: How Connections Learn Facial Attributes in Graph-based Expression Recognition
Vision Intelligence and Machine Learning (VIML) Group（视觉智能与机器学习组）；School of Computing and Electrical Engineering（计算与电气工程学院）；Indian Institute of Technology Mandi（印度理工学院曼迪分校）
Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur（印度理工学院克勒格布尔分校）
Extraction of discriminative features from salient facial patches plays a vital role in effective facial expression recognition. The accurate detection of facial landmarks improves the localization of the salient patches on face images. This paper proposes a novel framework for expression recognition by using appearance features of selected facial patches. A few prominent facial patches, depending on the position of facial landmarks, are extracted which are active during emotion elicitation. These active patches are further processed to obtain the salient patches which contain discriminative f…
Facial expressions are widely used in the behavioral interpretation of emotions, cognitive science, and social interactions. In this paper, we present a novel method for fully automatic facial expression recognition in facial image sequences. As the facial expression evolves over time facial landmarks are automatically tracked in consecutive video frames, using displacements based on elastic bunch graph matching displacement estimation. Feature vectors from individual landmarks, as well as pairs of landmarks tracking results are extracted, and normalized, with respect to the first frame in the…
Fasa University（法萨大学）；Deakin University（迪肯大学）；University of Tabriz（大不里士大学）；Universidad de Granada（格拉纳达大学）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Harvard University（哈佛大学）
One of the most common problems encountered in human-computer interaction is automatic facial expression recognition. Although it is easy for human observer to recognize facial expressions, automatic recognition remains difficult for machines. One of the methods that machines can recognize facial expression is analyzing the changes in face during facial expression presentation. In this paper, optical flow algorithm was used to extract deformation or motion vectors created in the face because of facial expressions. Then, these extracted motion vectors are used to be analyzed. Their positions an…
Facial expression analysis in the wild is challenging when the facial image is with low resolution or partial occlusion. Considering the correlations among different facial local regions under different facial expressions, this paper proposes a novel facial expression restoration method based on generative adversarial network by integrating an improved graph convolutional network (IGCN) and region relation modeling block (RRMB). Unlike conventional graph convolutional networks taking vectors as input features, IGCN can use tensors of face patches as inputs. It is better to retain the structure…
Politeknik Kuching（古晋理工学院）；Universiti Malaysia Sarawak（马来西亚砂拉越大学）
The muscular activities caused the activation of certain AUs for every facial expression at the certain duration of time throughout the facial expression. This paper presents the methods to recognise facial Action Unit (AU) using facial distance of the facial features which activates the muscles. The seven facial action units involved are AU1, AU4, AU6, AU12, AU15, AU17 and AU25 that characterises happy and sad expression. The recognition is performed on each AU according to rules defined based on the distance of each facial points. The facial distances chosen are extracted from twelve facial …
In this paper, we present a unified architecture known as Transfer-Editing and Recognition Generative Adversarial Network (TER-GAN) which can be used: 1. to transfer facial expressions from one identity to another identity, known as Facial Expression Transfer (FET), 2. to transform the expression of a given image to a target expression, while preserving the identity of the image, known as Facial Expression Editing (FEE), and 3. to recognize the facial expression of a face image, known as Facial Expression Recognition (FER). In TER-GAN, we combine the capabilities of generative models to genera…
Wuhan University（武汉大学）；West Virginia University（西弗吉尼亚大学）
Facial expressions of emotion play an important role in human social interactions. However, posed acting is not always the same as genuine feeling. Therefore, the credibility assessment of facial expressions, namely, the discrimination of genuine (spontaneous) expressions from posed(deliberate/volitional/deceptive) ones, is a crucial yet challenging task in facial expression understanding. Rapid progress has been made in recent years for automatic detection of genuine and posed facial expressions. This paper presents a general review of the relevant research, including several spontaneous vs. …
Synthetic Reality Lab（合成现实实验室）；University of Central Florida（中佛罗里达大学）
The representation used for Facial Expression Recognition (FER) usually contain expression information along with other variations such as identity and illumination. In this paper, we propose a novel Disentangled Expression learning-Generative Adversarial Network (DE-GAN) to explicitly disentangle facial expression representation from identity information. In this learning by reconstruction method, facial expression representation is learned by reconstructing an expression image employing an encoder-decoder based generator. This expression representation is disentangled from identity component…
University of Central Florida（中佛罗里达大学）；Hacettepe University（哈塞特佩大学）
Facial expression recognition is a challenging task due to two major problems: the presence of inter-subject variations in facial expression recognition dataset and impure expressions posed by human subjects. In this paper we present a novel Human-to-Animation conditional Generative Adversarial Network (HA-GAN) to overcome these two problems by using many (human faces) to one (animated face) mapping. Specifically, for any given input human expression image, our HA-GAN transfers the expression information from the input image to a fixed animated identity. Stylized animated characters from the F…
Automated facial identification and facial expression recognition have been topics of active research over the past few decades. Facial and expression recognition find applications in human-computer interfaces, subject tracking, real-time security surveillance systems and social networking. Several holistic and geometric methods have been developed to identify faces and expressions using public and local facial image databases. In this work we present the evolution in facial image data sets and the methodologies for facial identification and recognition of expressions such as anger, sadness, h…
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Photorealistic facial expression synthesis from single face image can be widely applied to face recognition, data augmentation for emotion recognition or entertainment. This problem is challenging, in part due to a paucity of labeled facial expression data, making it difficult for algorithms to disambiguate changes due to identity and changes due to expression. In this paper, we propose the conditional difference adversarial autoencoder, CDAAE, for facial expression synthesis. The CDAAE takes a facial image of a previously unseen person and generates an image of that human face with a target e…
National Institute of Technology Karnataka（卡纳塔克国立理工学院）
The proposed framework in this paper has the primary objective of classifying the facial expression shown by a person. These classifiable expressions can be any one of the six universal emotions along with the neutral emotion. After the initial facial localization is performed, facial landmark detection and feature extraction are applied where in the landmarks are determined to be the fiducial features: the eyebrows, eyes, nose and lips. This is primarily done using state-of-the-art facial landmark detection algorithms as well as traditional edge and corner point detection methods using Sobel …
Although facial landmark localization (FLL) approaches are becoming increasingly accurate for characterizing facial regions, one question remains unanswered: what is the impact of these approaches on subsequent related tasks? In this paper, the focus is put on facial expression recognition (FER), where facial landmarks are used for face registration, which is a common usage. Since the most used datasets for facial landmark localization do not allow for a proper measurement of performance according to the different difficulties (e.g., pose, expression, illumination, occlusion, motion blur), we …
Previous approaches to model and analyze facial expression analysis use three different techniques: facial action units, geometric features and graph based modelling. However, previous approaches have treated these technique separately. There is an interrelationship between these techniques. The facial expression analysis is significantly improved by utilizing these mappings between major geometric features involved in facial expressions and the subset of facial action units whose presence or absence are unique to a facial expression. This paper combines dimension reduction techniques and imag…
Recent advances in Generative Adversarial Nets (GANs) have shown remarkable improvements for facial expression editing. However, current methods are still prone to generate artifacts and blurs around expression-intensive regions, and often introduce undesired overlapping artifacts while handling large-gap expression transformations such as transformation from furious to laughing. To address these limitations, we propose Cascade Expression Focal GAN (Cascade EF-GAN), a novel network that performs progressive facial expression editing with local expression focuses. The introduction of the local …
An automatic Facial Expression Recognition (FER) model with Adaboost face detector, feature selection based on manifold learning and synergetic prototype based classifier has been proposed. Improved feature selection method and proposed classifier can achieve favorable effectiveness to performance FER in reasonable processing time.
Representations used for Facial Expression Recognition (FER) usually contain expression information along with identity features. In this paper, we propose a novel Disentangled Expression learning-Generative Adversarial Network (DE-GAN) which combines the concept of disentangled representation learning with residue learning to explicitly disentangle facial expression representation from identity information. In this method the facial expression representation is learned by reconstructing an expression image employing an encoder-decoder based generator. Unlike previous works using only expressi…
Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院软件研究所）
In this paper, we propose a Geometry-Contrastive Generative Adversarial Network (GC-GAN) for transferring continuous emotions across different subjects. Given an input face with certain emotion and a target facial expression from another subject, GC-GAN can generate an identity-preserving face with the target expression. Geometry information is introduced into cGANs as continuous conditions to guide the generation of facial expressions. In order to handle the misalignment across different subjects or emotions, contrastive learning is used to transform geometry manifold into an embedded semanti…
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…
In this paper, an Eigenvector based system has been presented to recognize facial expressions from digital facial images. In the approach, firstly the images were acquired and cropping of five significant portions from the image was performed to extract and store the Eigenvectors specific to the expressions. The Eigenvectors for the test images were also computed, and finally the input facial image was recognized when similarity was obtained by calculating the minimum Euclidean distance between the test image and the different expressions.
Multi-task learning is an effective learning strategy for deep-learning-based facial expression recognition tasks. However, most existing methods take into limited consideration the feature selection, when transferring information between different tasks, which may lead to task interference when training the multi-task networks. To address this problem, we propose a novel selective feature-sharing method, and establish a multi-task network for facial expression recognition and facial expression synthesis. The proposed method can effectively transfer beneficial features between different tasks,…
Deep learning based facial expression recognition (FER) has received a lot of attention in the past few years. Most of the existing deep learning based FER methods do not consider domain knowledge well, which thereby fail to extract representative features. In this work, we propose a novel FER framework, named Facial Motion Prior Networks (FMPN). Particularly, we introduce an addition branch to generate a facial mask so as to focus on facial muscle moving regions. To guide the facial mask learning, we propose to incorporate prior domain knowledge by using the average differences between neutra…
JD Digits（京东数科）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）
Much of the work on automatic facial expression recognition relies on databases containing a certain number of emotion classes and their exaggerated facial configurations (generally six prototypical facial expressions), based on Ekman's Basic Emotion Theory. However, recent studies have revealed that facial expressions in our human life can be blended with multiple basic emotions. And the emotion labels for these in-the-wild facial expressions cannot easily be annotated solely on pre-defined AU patterns. How to analyze the action units for such complex expressions is still an open question. To…
InnoPeak Technology（英诺赛科科技）；University of South Carolina（南卡罗来纳大学）；Qualcomm AI Research（高通人工智能研究院）
A novel Identity-Free conditional Generative Adversarial Network (IF-GAN) was proposed for Facial Expression Recognition (FER) to explicitly reduce high inter-subject variations caused by identity-related facial attributes, e.g., age, race, and gender. As part of an end-to-end system, a cGAN was designed to transform a given input facial expression image to an "average" identity face with the same expression as the input. Then, identity-free FER is possible since the generated images have the same synthetic "average" identity and differ only in their displayed expressions. Experiments on four …
Human exhibit rich gender cues in both appearance and behavior. In computer vision domain, gender recognition from facial appearance have been extensively studied, while facial behavior based gender recognition studies remain rare. In this work, we first demonstrate that facial expressions influence the gender patterns presented in 3D face, and gender recognition performance increases when training and testing within the same expression. In further, we design experiments which directly extract the morphological changes resulted from facial expressions as features, for expression-based gender r…
Brunel University London（布鲁内尔大学伦敦分校）；Ecole Centrale de Lyon（里昂中央理工学院）；Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学）
Meaningful facial parts can convey key cues for both facial action unit detection and expression prediction. Textured 3D face scan can provide both detailed 3D geometric shape and 2D texture appearance cues of the face which are beneficial for Facial Expression Recognition (FER). However, accurate facial parts extraction as well as their fusion are challenging tasks. In this paper, a novel system for 3D FER is designed based on accurate facial parts extraction and deep feature fusion of facial parts. In particular, each textured 3D face scan is firstly represented as a 2D texture map and a dep…
Knowledge-Enhanced Facial Expression Recognition with Emotional-to-Neutral Transformation
Hong Kong Baptist University（香港浸会大学）；Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications（重庆邮电大学）
Facial expression recognition is an essential task for various applications, including emotion detection, mental health analysis, and human-machine interactions. In this paper, we propose a multi-modal facial expression recognition method that exploits audio information along with facial images to provide a crucial clue to differentiate some ambiguous facial expressions. Specifically, we introduce a Modal Fusion Module (MFM) to fuse audio-visual information, where image and audio features are extracted from Swin Transformer. Additionally, we tackle the imbalance problem in the dataset by emplo…
National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, CASIA（中国科学院自动化研究所模式识别国家重点实验室）；Center for Research on Intelligent Perception and Computing, CASIA（中国科学院自动化研究所智能感知与计算研究中心）；Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, CAS（中国科学院脑科学与智能技术卓越创新中心）
Facial expression synthesis has drawn much attention in the field of computer graphics and pattern recognition. It has been widely used in face animation and recognition. However, it is still challenging due to the high-level semantic presence of large and non-linear face geometry variations. This paper proposes a Geometry-Guided Generative Adversarial Network (G2-GAN) for photo-realistic and identity-preserving facial expression synthesis. We employ facial geometry (fiducial points) as a controllable condition to guide facial texture synthesis with specific expression. A pair of generative ad…
Universidad Autonoma de Madrid（马德里自治大学）；Universitat Oberta de Catalunya（加泰罗尼亚开放大学）
This work explores facial expression bias as a security vulnerability of face recognition systems. Despite the great performance achieved by state-of-the-art face recognition systems, the algorithms are still sensitive to a large range of covariates. We present a comprehensive analysis of how facial expression bias impacts the performance of face recognition technologies. Our study analyzes: i) facial expression biases in the most popular face recognition databases; and ii) the impact of facial expression in face recognition performances. Our experimental framework includes two face detectors,…
