In this work, we introduce FaceXFormer, an end-to-end unified transformer model capable of performing ten facial analysis tasks within a single framework. These tasks include face parsing, landmark detection, head pose estimation, attribute prediction, age, gender, and race estimation, facial expression recognition, face recognition, and face visibility. Traditional face analysis approaches rely on task-specific architectures and pre-processing techniques, limiting scalability and integration. In contrast, FaceXFormer employs a transformer-based encoder-decoder architecture, where each task is represented as a learnable token, enabling seamless multi-task processing within a unified model. To enhance efficiency, we introduce FaceX, a lightweight decoder with a novel bi-directional cross-attention mechanism, which jointly processes face and task tokens to learn robust and generalized facial representations. We train FaceXFormer on ten diverse face perception datasets and evaluate it against both specialized and multi-task models across multiple benchmarks, demonstrating state-of-the-art or competitive performance. Additionally, we analyze the impact of various components of FaceXFormer on performance, assess real-world robustness in "in-the-wild" settings, and conduct a computational performance evaluation. To the best of our knowledge, FaceXFormer is the first model capable of handling ten facial analysis tasks while maintaining real-time performance at 33.21 FPS. Code: https://github.com/Kartik-3004/facexformer
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…
China University of Geosciences (Wuhan)（中国地质大学（武汉））；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；Jingdong（京东）
The recent success of Transformer has provided a new direction to various visual understanding tasks, including video-based facial expression recognition (FER). By modeling visual relations effectively, Transformer has shown its power for describing complicated patterns. However, Transformer still performs unsatisfactorily to notice subtle facial expression movements, because the expression movements of many videos can be too small to extract meaningful spatial-temporal relations and achieve robust performance. To this end, we propose to decompose each video into a series of expression snippet…
As various databases of facial expressions have been made accessible over the last few decades, the Facial Expression Recognition (FER) task has gotten a lot of interest. The multiple sources of the available databases raised several challenges for facial recognition task. These challenges are usually addressed by Convolution Neural Network (CNN) architectures. Different from CNN models, a Transformer model based on attention mechanism has been presented recently to address vision tasks. One of the major issue with Transformers is the need of a large data for training, while most FER databases…
When it comes to wild conditions, Facial Expression Recognition is often challenged with low-quality data and imbalanced, ambiguous labels. This field has much benefited from CNN based approaches; however, CNN models have structural limitation to see the facial regions in distant. As a remedy, Transformer has been introduced to vision fields with global receptive field, but requires adjusting input spatial size to the pretrained models to enjoy their strong inductive bias at hands. We herein raise a question whether using the deterministic interpolation method is enough to feed low-resolution …
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Facial Expression Recognition (FER) in the wild is an extremely challenging task in computer vision due to variant backgrounds, low-quality facial images, and the subjectiveness of annotators. These uncertainties make it difficult for neural networks to learn robust features on limited-scale datasets. Moreover, the networks can be easily distributed by the above factors and perform incorrect decisions. Recently, vision transformer (ViT) and data-efficient image transformers (DeiT) present their significant performance in traditional classification tasks. The self-attention mechanism makes tran…
Facial expression recognition (FER) is a challenging topic in artificial intelligence. Recently, many researchers have attempted to introduce Vision Transformer (ViT) to the FER task. However, ViT cannot fully utilize emotional features extracted from raw images and requires a lot of computing resources. To overcome these problems, we propose a quaternion orthogonal transformer (QOT) for FER. Firstly, to reduce redundancy among features extracted from pre-trained ResNet-50, we use the orthogonal loss to decompose and compact these features into three sets of orthogonal sub-features. Secondly, …
The paper describes our proposed methodology for the six basic expression classification track of Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) Competition 2022. In Learing from Synthetic Data(LSD) task, facial expression recognition (FER) methods aim to learn the representation of expression from the artificially generated data and generalise to real data. Because of the ambiguous of the synthetic data and the objectivity of the facial Action Unit (AU), we resort to the AU information for performance boosting, and make contributions as follows. First, to adapt the model to synthetic scenario…
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…
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…
Facial Action Units detection (FAUs) represents a fine-grained classification problem that involves identifying different units on the human face, as defined by the Facial Action Coding System. In this paper, we present a simple yet efficient Vision Transformer-based approach for addressing the task of Action Units (AU) detection in the context of Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) competition. We employ the Video Vision Transformer(ViViT) Network to capture the temporal facial change in the video. Besides, to reduce massive size of the Vision Transformers model, we replace the ViV…
Lanzhou University（兰州大学）；University of Guelph（圭尔夫大学）；Zhejiang Sci-Tech University（浙江理工大学）；Chongqing University（重庆大学）
The ever-increasing demands for intuitive interactions in Virtual Reality has triggered a boom in the realm of Facial Expression Recognition (FER). To address the limitations in existing approaches (e.g., narrow receptive fields and homogenous supervisory signals) and further cement the capacity of FER tools, a novel multifarious supervision-steering Transformer for FER in the wild is proposed in this paper. Referred as FER-former, our approach features multi-granularity embedding integration, hybrid self-attention scheme, and heterogeneous domain-steering supervision. In specific, to dig deep…
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）；West Virginia University（西弗吉尼亚大学）；Baidu Research（百度研究院）
Facial Expression Recognition (FER) in the wild is an extremely challenging task. Recently, some Vision Transformers (ViT) have been explored for FER, but most of them perform inferiorly compared to Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). This is mainly because the new proposed modules are difficult to converge well from scratch due to lacking inductive bias and easy to focus on the occlusion and noisy areas. TransFER, a representative transformer-based method for FER, alleviates this with multi-branch attention dropping but brings excessive computations. On the contrary, we present two attentive…
Studies have proven that domain bias and label bias exist in different Facial Expression Recognition (FER) datasets, making it hard to improve the performance of a specific dataset by adding other datasets. For the FER bias issue, recent researches mainly focus on the cross-domain issue with advanced domain adaption algorithms. This paper addresses another problem: how to boost FER performance by leveraging cross-domain datasets. Unlike the coarse and biased expression label, the facial Action Unit (AU) is fine-grained and objective suggested by psychological studies. Motivated by this, we res…
College of Electrical and Information Engineering, Hunan University（湖南大学电气与信息工程学院）
Previous methods for dynamic facial expression in the wild are mainly based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), whose local operations ignore the long-range dependencies in videos. To solve this problem, we propose the spatio-temporal Transformer (STT) to capture discriminative features within each frame and model contextual relationships among frames. Spatio-temporal dependencies are captured and integrated by our unified Transformer. Specifically, given an image sequence consisting of multiple frames as input, we utilize the CNN backbone to translate each frame into a visual feature seq…
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Institute of Deep Learning, Baidu Research（百度研究院深度学习研究所）；National Engineering Laboratory for Deep Learning Technology and Application（深度学习技术及应用国家工程实验室）；West Virginia University（西弗吉尼亚大学）
Facial expression recognition (FER) has received increasing interest in computer vision. We propose the TransFER model which can learn rich relation-aware local representations. It mainly consists of three components: Multi-Attention Dropping (MAD), ViT-FER, and Multi-head Self-Attention Dropping (MSAD). First, local patches play an important role in distinguishing various expressions, however, few existing works can locate discriminative and diverse local patches. This can cause serious problems when some patches are invisible due to pose variations or viewpoint changes. To address this issue…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Vision transformer (ViT) has been widely applied in many areas due to its self-attention mechanism that help obtain the global receptive field since the first layer. It even achieves surprising performance exceeding CNN in some vision tasks. However, there exists an issue when leveraging vision transformer into 2D+3D facial expression recognition (FER), i.e., ViT training needs mass data. Nonetheless, the number of samples in public 2D+3D FER datasets is far from sufficient for evaluation. How to utilize the ViT pre-trained on RGB images to handle 2D+3D data becomes a challenge. To solve this …
Shenzhen Technology University（深圳技术大学）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）
The paper describes our proposed methodology for the seven basic expression classification track of Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) Competition 2021. In this task, facial expression recognition (FER) methods aim to classify the correct expression category from a diverse background, but there are several challenges. First, to adapt the model to in-the-wild scenarios, we use the knowledge from pre-trained large-scale face recognition data. Second, we propose an ensemble model with a convolution neural network (CNN), a CNN-recurrent neural network (CNN-RNN), and a CNN-Transformer (…
Facial expression recognition (FER) plays a significant role in the ubiquitous application of computer vision. We revisit this problem with a new perspective on whether it can acquire useful representations that improve FER performance in the image generation process, and propose a novel generative method based on the image inversion mechanism for the FER task, termed Inversion FER (IFER). Particularly, we devise a novel Adversarial Style Inversion Transformer (ASIT) towards IFER to comprehensively extract features of generated facial images. In addition, ASIT is equipped with an image inversi…
Dynamic facial expression recognition (DFER) in the wild is an extremely challenging task, due to a large number of noisy frames in the video sequences. Previous works focus on extracting more discriminative features, but ignore distinguishing the key frames from the noisy frames. To tackle this problem, we propose a noise-robust dynamic facial expression recognition network (NR-DFERNet), which can effectively reduce the interference of noisy frames on the DFER task. Specifically, at the spatial stage, we devise a dynamic-static fusion module (DSF) that introduces dynamic features to static fe…
Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；Information Technology University（信息科技大学）；Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute（电子与电信研究所）
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）
Institute of Artificial Intelligence（人工智能研究院）；Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center（合肥综合性国家科学中心）
The in-the-wild affective behavior analysis has been an important study. In this paper, we submit our solutions for the 5th Workshop and Competition on Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW), which includes V-A Estimation, Facial Expression Classification and AU Detection Sub-challenges. We propose a Transformer Encoder with Multi-Head Attention framework to learn the distribution of both the spatial and temporal features. Besides, there are virious effective data augmentation strategies employed to alleviate the problems of sample imbalance during model training. The results fully dem…
FER-YOLO-Mamba: Facial Expression Detection and Classification Based on Selective State Space
School of Information Science and Technology, Southwest Jiaotong University（西南交通大学信息科学与技术学院）；School of Electrical and Information Engineering, University of the Witwatersrand（金山大学电气与信息工程学院）
From Static to Dynamic: Adapting Landmark-Aware Image Models for Facial Expression Recognition in Videos
School of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Hefei University of Technology（合肥工业大学计算机与信息工程学院）；Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
The vulnerability of face recognition systems to presentation attacks has limited their application in security-critical scenarios. Automatic methods of detecting such malicious attempts are essential for the safe use of facial recognition technology. Although various methods have been suggested for detecting such attacks, most of them over-fit the training set and fail in generalizing to unseen attacks and environments. In this work, we use transfer learning from the vision transformer model for the zero-shot anti-spoofing task. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated throu…
For computers to recognize human emotions, expression classification is an equally important problem in the human-computer interaction area. In the 3rd Affective Behavior Analysis In-The-Wild competition, the task of expression classification includes eight classes with six basic expressions of human faces from videos. In this paper, we employ a transformer mechanism to encode the robust representation from the backbone. Fusion of the robust representations plays an important role in the expression classification task. Our approach achieves 30.35\% and 28.60\% for the $F_1$ score on the valida…
Wuhan Institute of Technology（武汉工程大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）
Recently, face super-resolution (FSR) methods either feed whole face image into convolutional neural networks (CNNs) or utilize extra facial priors (e.g., facial parsing maps, facial landmarks) to focus on facial structure, thereby maintaining the consistency of the facial structure while restoring facial details. However, the limited receptive fields of CNNs and inaccurate facial priors will reduce the naturalness and fidelity of the reconstructed face. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm based on the self-attention mechanism (i.e., the core of Transformer) to fully explore the represe…
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
This paper describes our submission to the fourth Affective Behavior Analysis (ABAW) competition. We proposed a hybrid CNN-Transformer model for the Multi-Task-Learning (MTL) and Learning from Synthetic Data (LSD) task. Experimental results on validation dataset shows that our method achieves better performance than baseline model, which verifies that the effectiveness of proposed network.
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（中国电子科技大学）
Facial Action Coding System is an important approach of facial expression analysis.This paper describes our submission to the third Affective Behavior Analysis (ABAW) 2022 competition. We proposed a transfomer based model to detect facial action unit (FAU) in video. To be specific, we firstly trained a multi-modal model to extract both audio and visual feature. After that, we proposed a action units correlation module to learn relationships between each action unit labels and refine action unit detection result. Experimental results on validation dataset shows that our method achieves better p…
This paper presents a novel Transformer-based facial landmark localization network named Localization Transformer (LOTR). The proposed framework is a direct coordinate regression approach leveraging a Transformer network to better utilize the spatial information in the feature map. An LOTR model consists of three main modules: 1) a visual backbone that converts an input image into a feature map, 2) a Transformer module that improves the feature representation from the visual backbone, and 3) a landmark prediction head that directly predicts the landmark coordinates from the Transformer's repre…
Samsung R&D Institute China Xi’an (SRCX)（三星中国西安研发中心（SRCX））；Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT)（三星先进技术研究院（SAIT））
Accurate facial landmarks are essential prerequisites for many tasks related to human faces. In this paper, an accurate facial landmark detector is proposed based on cascaded transformers. We formulate facial landmark detection as a coordinate regression task such that the model can be trained end-to-end. With self-attention in transformers, our model can inherently exploit the structured relationships between landmarks, which would benefit landmark detection under challenging conditions such as large pose and occlusion. During cascaded refinement, our model is able to extract the most relevan…
Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence（起始人工智能研究院）；Terminus Group（特斯联科技集团）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）
This paper presents a Refinement Pyramid Transformer (RePFormer) for robust facial landmark detection. Most facial landmark detectors focus on learning representative image features. However, these CNN-based feature representations are not robust enough to handle complex real-world scenarios due to ignoring the internal structure of landmarks, as well as the relations between landmarks and context. In this work, we formulate the facial landmark detection task as refining landmark queries along pyramid memories. Specifically, a pyramid transformer head (PTH) is introduced to build both homologo…
FSRT: Facial Scene Representation Transformer for Face Reenactment from Factorized Appearance, Head-pose, and Facial Expression Features
Autonomous Intelligent Systems - Computer Science Institute VI and Center for Robotics, University of Bonn（波恩大学自主智能系统 - 计算机科学第六研究所与机器人中心）；Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence（拉马尔机器学习和人工智能研究所）
Reweighting Framewise Attention in Video Transformers for Facial Expression Understanding
Inria, Université Côte d’Azur, France（法国国家信息与自动化研究所、法国滨海阿尔卑斯大学）；Hanyang University, South Korea（韩国家阳大学）；Pusan National University, South Korea（韩国釜山国立大学）
Holistic methods using CNNs and margin-based losses have dominated research on face recognition. In this work, we depart from this setting in two ways: (a) we employ the Vision Transformer as an architecture for training a very strong baseline for face recognition, simply called fViT, which already surpasses most state-of-the-art face recognition methods. (b) Secondly, we capitalize on the Transformer's inherent property to process information (visual tokens) extracted from irregular grids to devise a pipeline for face recognition which is reminiscent of part-based face recognition methods. Ou…
Since the Transformer architecture was introduced in 2017 there has been many attempts to bring the self-attention paradigm in the field of computer vision. In this paper we propose a novel self-attention module that can be easily integrated in virtually every convolutional neural network and that is specifically designed for computer vision, the LHC: Local (multi) Head Channel (self-attention). LHC is based on two main ideas: first, we think that in computer vision the best way to leverage the self-attention paradigm is the channel-wise application instead of the more explored spatial attenti…
PLGSA-Transformer: Periocular Landmark-Guided Attention with Occlusion-Adaptive Cosine Thresholding for Cross-Modal Masked and Unmasked Face Recognition
Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science, Qaiwan International University（工程与计算机科学学院，卡伊万国际大学）；Department of Information and Communication Technology Center (ICTC)-System Information, Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research（信息与通信技术中心（ICTC）-系统信息，高等教育与科学研究部）
Blind face restoration usually encounters with diverse scale face inputs, especially in the real world. However, most of the current works support specific scale faces, which limits its application ability in real-world scenarios. In this work, we propose a novel scale-aware blind face restoration framework, named FaceFormer, which formulates facial feature restoration as scale-aware transformation. The proposed Facial Feature Up-sampling (FFUP) module dynamically generates upsampling filters based on the original scale-factor priors, which facilitate our network to adapt to arbitrary face sca…
SVFAP: Self-supervised Video Facial Affect Perceiver
School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
