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 addition to features; and (c) smart temporal context selection. We validate our approach on four databases, two for Valence and Arousal estimation (SEWA and AffWild2), and two for Action Unit intensity estimation (DISFA and BP4D). Results show a consistent improvement over a series of strong baselines as well as over state-of-the-art methods.
Among human affective behavior research, facial expression recognition research is improving in performance along with the development of deep learning. However, for improved performance, not only past images but also future images should be used along with corresponding facial images, but there are obstacles to the application of this technique to real-time environments. In this paper, we propose the causal affect prediction network (CAPNet), which uses only past facial images to predict corresponding affective valence and arousal. We train CAPNet to learn causal inference between past images…
Parkinson's Disease (PD) is a neurological disorder that affects facial movements and non-verbal communication. Patients with PD present a reduction in facial movements called hypomimia which is evaluated in item 3.2 of the MDS-UPDRS-III scale. In this work, we propose to use facial expression analysis from face images based on affective domains to improve PD detection. We propose different domain adaptation techniques to exploit the latest advances in face recognition and Face Action Unit (FAU) detection. The principal contributions of this work are: (1) a novel framework to exploit deep face…
Facial behavior analysis is a broad topic with various categories such as facial emotion recognition, age, and gender recognition. Many studies focus on individual tasks while the multi-task learning approach is still an open research issue and requires more research. In this paper, we present our solution and experiment result for the Multi-Task Learning challenge of the Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild competition. The challenge is a combination of three tasks: action unit detection, facial expression recognition, and valance-arousal estimation. To address this challenge, we introduce…
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.
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…
MAFW: A Large-scale, Multi-modal, Compound Affective Database for Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition in the Wild
School of Computer Science, CUG University of Geosciences (Wuhan)（中国地质大学（武汉）计算机学院）；Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）
Affective Video Content Analysis: Decade Review and New Perspectives
Research Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Zhejiang Lab（之江实验室人工智能研究院）；School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Zhengzhou University（郑州大学网络空间安全学院）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学计算机科学与技术学院）
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Facial affective behavior analysis is important for human-computer interaction. 5th ABAW competition includes three challenges from Aff-Wild2 database. Three common facial affective analysis tasks are involved, i.e. valence-arousal estimation, expression classification, action unit recognition. For the three challenges, we construct three different models to solve the corresponding problems to improve the results, such as data unbalance and data noise. For the experiments of three challenges, we train the models on the provided training data and validate the models on the validation data.
Visual Emotion Analysis (VEA) is attracting increasing attention. One of the biggest challenges of VEA is to bridge the affective gap between visual clues in a picture and the emotion expressed by the picture. As the granularity of emotions increases, the affective gap increases as well. Existing deep approaches try to bridge the gap by directly learning discrimination among emotions globally in one shot without considering the hierarchical relationship among emotions at different affective levels and the affective level of emotions to be classified. In this paper, we present the Multi-level D…
In this paper, we present a multimodal approach to simultaneously analyze facial movements and several peripheral physiological signals to decode individualized affective experiences under positive and negative emotional contexts, while considering their personalized resting dynamics. We propose a person-specific recurrence network to quantify the dynamics present in the person's facial movements and physiological data. Facial movement is represented using a robust head vs. 3D face landmark localization and tracking approach, and physiological data are processed by extracting known attributes …
The quantified measurement of facial expressiveness is crucial to analyze human affective behavior at scale. Unfortunately, methods for expressiveness quantification at the video frame-level are largely unexplored, unlike the study of discrete expression. In this work, we propose an algorithm that quantifies facial expressiveness using a bounded, continuous expressiveness score using multimodal facial features, such as action units (AUs), landmarks, head pose, and gaze. The proposed algorithm more heavily weights AUs with high intensities and large temporal changes. The proposed algorithm can …
In recent years, the main problem in e-learning has shifted from analyzing content to personalization of learning environment by Intelligence Tutoring Systems (ITSs). Therefore, by designing personalized teaching models, learners are able to have a successful and satisfying experience in achieving their learning goals. Affective Tutoring Systems (ATSs) are some kinds of ITS that can recognize and respond to affective states of learner. In this study, we designed, implemented, and evaluated a system to personalize the learning environment based on the facial emotions recognition, head pose esti…
University of North Carolina at Greensboro（北卡罗来纳大学格林斯伯勒分校）
We present a Fourier-based machine learning technique that characterizes and detects facial emotions. The main challenging task in the development of machine learning (ML) models for classifying facial emotions is the detection of accurate emotional features from a set of training samples, and the generation of feature vectors for constructing a meaningful feature space and building ML models. In this paper, we hypothesis that the emotional features are hidden in the frequency domain; hence, they can be captured by leveraging the frequency domain and masking techniques. We also make use of the…
School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University（计算机科学学院，西北工业大学）；School of Cybersecurity, Northwestern Polytechnical University（网络安全学院，西北工业大学）；School of Electronics and Information, Northwestern Polytechnical University（电子与信息学院，西北工业大学）
Affective Image Editing: Shaping Emotional Factors via Text Descriptions
School of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China（北京邮电大学人工智能学院）；Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence（北京人工智能研究院）；State Key Laboratory for Multimedia Information Processing and National Engineering Research Center of Visual Technology, School of Computer Science, Peking University, China（多媒体信息处理国家重点实验室和视觉技术国家工程研究中心，北京大学计算机学院）
University of Miami（迈阿密大学）；Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati（印度理工学院古瓦哈提分校）
Inspired from the assets of handcrafted and deep learning approaches, we proposed a RARITYNet: RARITY guided affective emotion learning framework to learn the appearance features and identify the emotion class of facial expressions. The RARITYNet framework is designed by combining the shallow (RARITY) and deep (AffEmoNet) features to recognize the facial expressions from challenging images as spontaneous expressions, pose variations, ethnicity changes, and illumination conditions. The RARITY is proposed to encode the inter-radial transitional patterns in the local neighbourhood. The AffEmoNet:…
University of Hamburg（汉堡大学）；Apprente Inc（Apprente公司）
Recent models of emotion recognition strongly rely on supervised deep learning solutions for the distinction of general emotion expressions. However, they are not reliable when recognizing online and personalized facial expressions, e.g., for person-specific affective understanding. In this paper, we present a neural model based on a conditional adversarial autoencoder to learn how to represent and edit general emotion expressions. We then propose Grow-When-Required networks as personalized affective memories to learn individualized aspects of emotion expressions. Our model achieves state-of-t…
Bogazici University（博阿齐奇大学）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）
As affective robots become integral in human life, these agents must be able to fairly evaluate human affective expressions without discriminating against specific demographic groups. Identifying bias in Machine Learning (ML) systems as a critical problem, different approaches have been proposed to mitigate such biases in the models both at data and algorithmic levels. In this work, we propose Continual Learning (CL) as an effective strategy to enhance fairness in Facial Expression Recognition (FER) systems, guarding against biases arising from imbalances in data distributions. We compare diff…
VidEmo: Affective-Tree Reasoning for Emotion-Centric Video Foundation Models
Nankai University（南开大学）；Pengcheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Kuaishou Technology（快手科技）；Nankai International Advanced Research Institute (SHENZHEN·FUTIAN)（南开国际先进研究院（深圳·福田））
We present a learning-based method for detecting real and fake deepfake multimedia content. To maximize information for learning, we extract and analyze the similarity between the two audio and visual modalities from within the same video. Additionally, we extract and compare affective cues corresponding to perceived emotion from the two modalities within a video to infer whether the input video is "real" or "fake". We propose a deep learning network, inspired by the Siamese network architecture and the triplet loss. To validate our model, we report the AUC metric on two large-scale deepfake d…
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Tokyo Institute of Technology（东京工业大学）
Affective Behavior Analysis is an important part in human-computer interaction. Existing multi-task affective behavior recognition methods suffer from the problem of incomplete labeled datasets. To tackle this problem, this paper presents a semi-supervised model with a mean teacher framework to leverage additional unlabeled data. To be specific, a multi-task model is proposed to learn three different kinds of facial affective representations simultaneously. After that, the proposed model is assigned to be student and teacher networks. When training with unlabeled data, the teacher network is e…
University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；Universitá degli Studi di Milano（米兰大学）
Understanding the mental state of other people is an important skill for intelligent agents and robots to operate within social environments. However, the mental processes involved in `mind-reading' are complex. One explanation of such processes is Simulation Theory - it is supported by a large body of neuropsychological research. Yet, determining the best computational model or theory to use in simulation-style emotion detection, is far from being understood. In this work, we use Simulation Theory and neuroscience findings on Mirror-Neuron Systems as the basis for a novel computational model,…
This note gives a preliminary account of the transcoding or rechanneling problem between different stimuli as it is of interest for the natural interaction or affective computing fields. By the consideration of a simple example, namely the color response of an affective lamp to a sensed facial expression, we frame the problem within an information- theoretic perspective. A full justification in terms of the Information Bottleneck principle promotes a latent affective space, hitherto surmised as an appealing and intuitive solution, as a suitable mediator between the different stimuli.
Department of Computer Science and Technology（计算机科学与技术系）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）
As machine learning approaches are increasingly used to augment human decision-making, eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) research has explored methods for communicating system behavior to humans. However, these approaches often fail to account for the emotional responses of humans as they interact with explanations. Facial affect analysis, which examines human facial expressions of emotions, is one promising lens for understanding how users engage with explanations. Therefore, in this work, we aim to (1) identify which facial affect features are pronounced when people interact with XAI…
Recently deep generative models have achieved impressive results in the field of automated facial expression editing. However, the approaches presented so far presume a discrete representation of human emotions and are therefore limited in the modelling of non-discrete emotional expressions. To overcome this limitation, we explore how continuous emotion representations can be used to control automated expression editing. We propose a deep generative model that can be used to manipulate facial expressions in facial images according to continuous two-dimensional emotion labels. One dimension rep…
In recent years, Affective Computing and its applications have become a fast-growing research topic. Furthermore, the rise of Deep Learning has introduced significant improvements in the emotion recognition system compared to classical methods. In this work, we propose a multi-modal emotion recognition model based on deep learning techniques using the combination of peripheral physiological signals and facial expressions. Moreover, we present an improvement to proposed models by introducing latent features extracted from our internal Bio Auto-Encoder (BAE). Both models are trained and evaluate…
University of the Chinese Academy of Science（中国科学院大学）
Affective behaviour analysis has aroused researchers' attention due to its broad applications. However, it is labor exhaustive to obtain accurate annotations for massive face images. Thus, we propose to utilize the prior facial information via Masked Auto-Encoder (MAE) pretrained on unlabeled face images. Furthermore, we combine MAE pretrained Vision Transformer (ViT) and AffectNet pretrained CNN to perform multi-task emotion recognition. We notice that expression and action unit (AU) scores are pure and intact features for valence-arousal (VA) regression. As a result, we utilize AffectNet pre…
Facial Affective Behavior Analysis with Instruction Tuning
Michigan State University（密歇根州立大学）；Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）；University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；Harvard University（哈佛大学）
Towards Deeper Emotional Reflection: Crafting Affective Image Filters with Generative Priors
School of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学人工智能学院）；Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence（北京人工智能研究院）；State Key Laboratory of Multimedia Information Processing and National Engineering Research Center of Visual Technology, School of Computer Science, Peking University（北京大学多媒体信息处理国家重点实验室和视觉技术国家工程研究中心）
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）；University of Maryland at College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）
We present a new data-driven model and algorithm to identify the perceived emotions of individuals based on their walking styles. Given an RGB video of an individual walking, we extract his/her walking gait in the form of a series of 3D poses. Our goal is to exploit the gait features to classify the emotional state of the human into one of four emotions: happy, sad, angry, or neutral. Our perceived emotion recognition approach uses deep features learned via LSTM on labeled emotion datasets. Furthermore, we combine these features with affective features computed from gaits using posture and mov…
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.
We present Affect2MM, a learning method for time-series emotion prediction for multimedia content. Our goal is to automatically capture the varying emotions depicted by characters in real-life human-centric situations and behaviors. We use the ideas from emotion causation theories to computationally model and determine the emotional state evoked in clips of movies. Affect2MM explicitly models the temporal causality using attention-based methods and Granger causality. We use a variety of components like facial features of actors involved, scene understanding, visual aesthetics, action/situation…
This report is about facial asymmetry, its connection to emotional expression, and methods of measuring facial asymmetry in videos of faces. The research was motivated by two factors: firstly, there was a real opportunity to develop a novel measure of asymmetry that required minimal human involvement and that improved on earlier measures in the literature; and secondly, the study of the relationship between facial asymmetry and emotional expression is both interesting in its own right, and important because it can inform neuropsychological theory and answer open questions concerning emotional …
Face based affective computing consists in detecting emotions from face images. It is useful to unlock better automatic comprehension of human behaviours and could pave the way toward improved human-machines interactions. However it comes with the challenging task of designing a computational representation of emotions. So far, emotions have been represented either continuously in the 2D Valence/Arousal space or in a discrete manner with Ekman's 7 basic emotions. Alternatively, Ekman's Facial Action Unit (AU) system have also been used to caracterize emotions using a codebook of unitary muscul…
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…
To fully understand the complexities of human emotion, the integration of multiple physical features from different modalities can be advantageous. Considering this, we present an analysis of 3D facial data, action units, and physiological data as it relates to their impact on emotion recognition. We analyze each modality independently, as well as the fusion of each for recognizing human emotion. This analysis includes which features are most important for specific emotions (e.g. happy). Our analysis indicates that both 3D facial landmarks and physiological data are encouraging for expression/…
