Automatic Detection of Sentimentality from Facial Expressions

Emotion recognition has received considerable attention from the Computer Vision community in the last 20 years. However, most of the research focused on analyzing the six basic emotions (e.g. joy, anger, surprise), with a limited work directed to other affective states. In this paper, we tackle sentimentality (strong feeling of heartwarming or nostalgia), a new emotional state that has few works in the literature, and no guideline defining its facial markers. To this end, we first collect a dataset of 4.9K videos of participants watching some sentimental and non-sentimental ads, and then we label the moments evoking sentimentality in the ads. Second, we use the ad-level labels and the facial Action Units (AUs) activation across different frames for defining some weak frame-level sentimentality labels. Third, we train a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) using the AUs activation for sentimentality detection. Finally, we define two new ad-level metrics for evaluating our model performance. Quantitative and qualitative results show promising results for sentimentality detection. To the best of our knowledge this is the first work to address the problem of sentimentality detection.

AFFDEX 2.0: A Real-Time Facial Expression Analysis Toolkit

In this paper we introduce AFFDEX 2.0 - a toolkit for analyzing facial expressions in the wild, that is, it is intended for users aiming to; a) estimate the 3D head pose, b) detect facial Action Units (AUs), c) recognize basic emotions and 2 new emotional states (sentimentality and confusion), and d) detect high-level expressive metrics like blink and attention. AFFDEX 2.0 models are mainly based on Deep Learning, and are trained using a large-scale naturalistic dataset consisting of thousands of participants from different demographic groups. AFFDEX 2.0 is an enhanced version of our previous toolkit [1], that is capable of tracking efficiently faces at more challenging conditions, detecting more accurately facial expressions, and recognizing new emotional states (sentimentality and confusion). AFFDEX 2.0 can process multiple faces in real time, and is working across the Windows and Linux platforms.

Choose Settings Carefully: Comparing Action Unit detection at Different Settings Using a Large-Scale Dataset

In this paper, we investigate the impact of some of the commonly used settings for (a) preprocessing face images, and (b) classification and training, on Action Unit (AU) detection performance and complexity. We use in our investigation a large-scale dataset, consisting of ~55K videos collected in the wild for participants watching commercial ads. The preprocessing settings include scaling the face to a fixed resolution, changing the color information (RGB to gray-scale), aligning the face, and cropping AU regions, while the classification and training settings include the kind of classifier (multi-label vs. binary) and the amount of data used for training models. To the best of our knowledge, no work had investigated the effect of those settings on AU detection. In our analysis we use CNNs as our baseline classification model.

Which CNNs and Training Settings to Choose for Action Unit Detection? A Study Based on a Large-Scale Dataset

In this paper we explore the influence of some frequently used Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), training settings, and training set structures, on Action Unit (AU) detection. Specifically, we first compare 10 different shallow and deep CNNs in AU detection. Second, we investigate how the different training settings (i.e. centering/normalizing the inputs, using different augmentation severities, and balancing the data) impact the performance in AU detection. Third, we explore the effect of increasing the number of labelled subjects and frames in the training set on the AU detection performance. These comparisons provide the research community with useful tips about the choice of different CNNs and training settings in AU detection. In our analysis, we use a large-scale naturalistic dataset, consisting of ~55K videos captured in the wild. To the best of our knowledge, there is no work that had investigated the impact of such settings on a large-scale AU dataset.

TARN: Temporal Attentive Relation Network for Few-Shot and Zero-Shot Action Recognition

In this paper we propose a novel Temporal Attentive Relation Network (TARN) for the problems of few-shot and zero-shot action recognition. At the heart of our network is a meta-learning approach that learns to compare representations of variable temporal length, that is, either two videos of different length (in the case of few-shot action recognition) or a video and a semantic representation such as word vector (in the case of zero-shot action recognition). By contrast to other works in few-shot and zero-shot action recognition, we a) utilise attention mechanisms so as to perform temporal alignment, and b) learn a deep-distance measure on the aligned representations at video segment level. We adopt an episode-based training scheme and train our network in an end-to-end manner. The proposed method does not require any fine-tuning in the target domain or maintaining additional representations as is the case of memory networks. Experimental results show that the proposed architecture outperforms the state of the art in few-shot action recognition, and achieves competitive results in zero-shot action recognition.

SchiNet: Automatic Estimation of Symptoms of Schizophrenia from Facial Behaviour Analysis

Patients with schizophrenia often display impairments in the expression of emotion and speech and those are observed in their facial behaviour. Automatic analysis of patients' facial expressions that is aimed at estimating symptoms of schizophrenia has received attention recently. However, the datasets that are typically used for training and evaluating the developed methods, contain only a small number of patients (4-34) and are recorded while the subjects were performing controlled tasks such as listening to life vignettes, or answering emotional questions. In this paper, we use videos of professional-patient interviews, in which symptoms were assessed in a standardised way as they should/may be assessed in practice, and which were recorded in realistic conditions (i.e. varying illumination levels and camera viewpoints) at the patients' homes or at mental health services. We automatically analyse the facial behaviour of 91 out-patients - this is almost 3 times the number of patients in other studies - and propose SchiNet, a novel neural network architecture that estimates expression-related symptoms in two different assessment interviews. We evaluate the proposed SchiNet for patient-independent prediction of symptoms of schizophrenia. Experimental results show that some automatically detected facial expressions are significantly correlated to symptoms of schizophrenia, and that the proposed network for estimating symptom severity delivers promising results.