Facial expression recognition has been an active research area over the past few decades, and it is still challenging due to the high intra-class variation.
Traditional approaches for this problem rely on hand-crafted features such as SIFT, HOG and LBP, followed by a classifier trained on a database of images or videos.
Most of these works perform reasonably well on datasets of images captured in a controlled condition, but fail to perform as good on more challenging datasets with more image variation and partial faces.
In recent years, several works proposed an end-to-end framework for facial expression recognition, using deep learning models.
Despite the better performance of these works, there still seems to be a great room for improvement.
In this work, we propose a deep learning approach based on attentional convolutional network, which is able to focus on important parts of the face, and achieves significant improvement over previous models on multiple datasets, including FER-2013, CK+, FERG, and JAFFE.
We also use a visualization technique which is able to find important face regions for detecting different emotions, based on the classifier's output.
Through experimental results, we show that different emotions seems to be sensitive to different parts of the face.
Facial Expression Recognition (FER) in the wild is extremely challenging due to occlusions, variant head poses, face deformation and motion blur under unconstrained conditions. Although substantial progresses have been made in automatic FER in the past few decades, previous studies were mainly designed for lab-controlled FER. Real-world occlusions, variant head poses and other issues definitely increase the difficulty of FER on account of these information-deficient regions and complex backgrounds. Different from previous pure CNNs based methods, we argue that it is feasible and practical to t…
K. J. Somaiya College of Engineering（K. J. 索马亚工程学院）
Facial Emotion Recognition is an inherently difficult problem, due to vast differences in facial structures of individuals and ambiguity in the emotion displayed by a person. Recently, a lot of work is being done in the field of Facial Emotion Recognition, and the performance of the CNNs for this task has been inferior compared to the results achieved by CNNs in other fields like Object detection, Facial recognition etc. In this paper, we propose a multi-task learning algorithm, in which a single CNN detects gender, age and race of the subject along with their emotion. We validate this propose…
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…
International Institute Of Information Technology, Hyderabad（海得拉巴国际信息技术研究所）
The tremendous development in deep learning has led facial expression recognition (FER) to receive much attention in the past few years. Although 3D FER has an inherent edge over its 2D counterpart, work on 2D images has dominated the field. The main reason for the slow development of 3D FER is the unavailability of large training and large test datasets. Recognition accuracies have already saturated on existing 3D emotion recognition datasets due to their small gallery sizes. Unlike 2D photographs, 3D facial scans are not easy to collect, causing a bottleneck in the development of deep 3D FER…
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）
Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）；JD Finance America Corporation（京东金融美国公司）；Peking University（北京大学）
By utilizing label distribution learning, a probability distribution is assigned for a facial image to express a compound emotion, which effectively improves the problem of label uncertainties and noises occurred in one-hot labels. In practice, it is observed that correlations among emotions are inherently different, such as surprised and happy emotions are more possibly synchronized than surprised and neutral. It indicates the correlation may be crucial for obtaining a reliable label distribution. Based on this, we propose a new method that amends the label distribution of each facial image b…
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 …
In this article, the results of our team for the fifth Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) competition are presented. The usage of the pre-trained convolutional networks from the EmotiEffNet family for frame-level feature extraction is studied. In particular, we propose an ensemble of a multi-layered perceptron and the LightAutoML-based classifier. The post-processing by smoothing the results for sequential frames is implemented. Experimental results for the large-scale Aff-Wild2 database demonstrate that our model achieves a much greater macro-averaged F1-score for facial expressio…
University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）；Waterloo Artificial Intelligence Institute（滑铁卢人工智能研究所）；DarwinAI Corp.（DarwinAI公司）
While recent advances in deep learning have led to significant improvements in facial expression classification (FEC), a major challenge that remains a bottleneck for the widespread deployment of such systems is their high architectural and computational complexities. This is especially challenging given the operational requirements of various FEC applications, such as safety, marketing, learning, and assistive living, where real-time requirements on low-cost embedded devices is desired. Motivated by this need for a compact, low latency, yet accurate system capable of performing FEC in real-ti…
Facebook AI Applied Research（Facebook人工智能应用研究）；University of Bristol（布里斯托大学）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）
Apparent emotional facial expression recognition has attracted a lot of research attention recently. However, the majority of approaches ignore age differences and train a generic model for all ages. In this work, we study the effect of using different age-groups for training apparent emotional facial expression recognition models. To this end, we study Domain Generalisation in the context of apparent emotional facial expression recognition from facial imagery across different age groups. We first compare several domain generalisation algorithms on the basis of out-of-domain-generalisation, an…
AffectNet+: A Database for Enhancing Facial Expression Recognition with Soft-Labels
Ritchie School of Engineering and Computer Science, University of Denver（丹佛大学里奇工程与计算机科学学院）；College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Denver（丹佛大学艺术、人文与社会科学学院）
One of the key research areas in computer vision addressed by a vast number of publications is the processing and understanding of images containing human faces. The most often addressed tasks include face detection, facial landmark localization, face recognition and facial expression analysis. Other, more specialized tasks such as affective computing, the extraction of vital signs from videos or analysis of social interaction usually require one or several of the aforementioned tasks that have to be performed. In our work, we analyze that a large number of tasks for facial image processing in…
Samsung AI Center Cambridge（三星剑桥人工智能中心）；University of Nottingham（诺丁汉大学）
Temporal context is key to the recognition of expressions of emotion. Existing methods, that rely on recurrent or self-attention models to enforce temporal consistency, work on the feature level, ignoring the task-specific temporal dependencies, and fail to model context uncertainty. To alleviate these issues, we build upon the framework of Neural Processes to propose a method for apparent emotion recognition with three key novel components: (a) probabilistic contextual representation with a global latent variable model; (b) temporal context modelling using task-specific predictions in additio…
Real-time Facial Expression Recognition "In The Wild'' by Disentangling 3D Expression from Identity
College of Engineering, Mathematics and Physical Sciences, University of Exeter（埃克塞特大学工程、数学与物理科学学院）；Institute of Computer Science (ICS), Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (FORTH)（希腊研究与技术基金会计算机科学研究所）
Facial Expression Recognition is a vital research topic in most fields ranging from artificial intelligence and gaming to Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Psychology. This paper proposes a hybrid model for Facial Expression recognition, which comprises a Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) and Haar Cascade deep learning architectures. The objective is to classify real-time and digital facial images into one of the seven facial emotion categories considered. The DCNN employed in this research has more convolutional layers, ReLU Activation functions, and multiple kernels to enhance filt…
African Institute for Mathematical Sciences（非洲数学科学研究所）；Stellenbosch University（Stellenbosch大学）；South African Astronomical Observatory（南非天文台）；South African Radio Astronomy Observatory（南非射电天文台）；University of Cape Town（开普敦大学）
Deep facial expression recognition faces two challenges that both stem from the large number of trainable parameters: long training times and a lack of interpretability. We propose a novel method based on evolutionary algorithms, that deals with both challenges by massively reducing the number of trainable parameters, whilst simultaneously retaining classification performance, and in some cases achieving superior performance. We are robustly able to reduce the number of parameters on average by 95% (e.g. from 2M to 100k parameters) with no loss in classification accuracy. The algorithm learns …
There is little prior work on quantifying the relationships between facial expressions and emotionality in American Sign Language. In this final report, we provide two methods for studying these relationships through probability and prediction. Using a large corpus of natural signing manually annotated with facial features paired with lexical emotion datasets, we find that there exist many relationships between emotionality and the face, and that a simple classifier can predict what someone is saying in terms of broad emotional categories only by looking at the face.
State University of New York at Binghamton（纽约州立大学宾汉姆顿分校）
Emotion is an experience associated with a particular pattern of physiological activity along with different physiological, behavioral and cognitive changes. One behavioral change is facial expression, which has been studied extensively over the past few decades. Facial behavior varies with a person's emotion according to differences in terms of culture, personality, age, context, and environment. In recent years, physiological activities have been used to study emotional responses. A typical signal is the electroencephalogram (EEG), which measures brain activity. Most of existing EEG-based em…
We present Wav2Lip-Emotion, a video-to-video translation architecture that modifies facial expressions of emotion in videos of speakers. Previous work modifies emotion in images, uses a single image to produce a video with animated emotion, or puppets facial expressions in videos with landmarks from a reference video. However, many use cases such as modifying an actor's performance in post-production, coaching individuals to be more animated speakers, or touching up emotion in a teleconference require a video-to-video translation approach. We explore a method to maintain speakers' lip movement…
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…
EmoDiffusion: Enhancing Emotional 3D Facial Animation with Latent Diffusion Models
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；University of Science and Technology Beijing（北京科技大学）；The New Laboratory of Pattern Recognition (NLPR), State Key Laboratory of Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所多模态人工智能系统国家重点实验室模式识别新实验室）；The New Laboratory of Pattern Recognition (NLPR)（模式识别新实验室）
Second University of Naples（那不勒斯第二大学）；IIASS；Brno University of Technology（布尔诺理工大学）；EUP Mataró（马塔罗EUP）
This work defines a procedure for collecting naturally induced emotional facial expressions through the vision of movie excerpts with high emotional contents and reports experimental data ascertaining the effects of emotions on memory word recognition tasks. The induced emotional states include the four basic emotions of sadness, disgust, happiness, and surprise, as well as the neutral emotional state. The resulting database contains both thermal and visible emotional facial expressions, portrayed by forty Italian subjects and simultaneously acquired by appropriately synchronizing a thermal an…
Automatic Recognition of Facial Displays of Unfelt Emotions
iCV Research Group, Institute of Technology, University of Tartu（塔尔图大学技术研究所 iCV 研究组）；Computer Vision Center（计算机视觉中心）；University of Barcelona（巴塞罗那大学）；University of Autonoma, Barcelona（巴塞罗那自治大学）；Universitat Oberta de Catalunya（加泰罗尼亚开放大学）；Institute of Physiology and Pathology of Hearing（听力生理学与病理学研究所）；Department of Psychology, University of Tartu（塔尔图大学心理学系）；The Estonian Center of Behavioral and Health Sciences（爱沙尼亚行为与健康科学中心）；Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Hasan Kalyoncu University（哈桑·卡尔永库大学电气与电子工程系）
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. …
