Facial Affect Estimation in the Wild Using Deep Residual and Convolutional Networks

Automated affective computing in the wild is a challenging task in the field of computer vision. This paper presents three neural network-based methods proposed for the task of facial affect estimation submitted to the First Affect-in-the-Wild challenge. These methods are based on Inception-ResNet modules redesigned specifically for the task of facial affect estimation. These methods are: Shallow Inception-ResNet, Deep Inception-ResNet, and Inception-ResNet with LSTMs. These networks extract facial features in different scales and simultaneously estimate both the valence and arousal in each frame. Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) rates of 0.4 and 0.3 are achieved for the valence and arousal respectively with corresponding Concordance Correlation Coefficient (CCC) rates of 0.04 and 0.29 using Deep Inception-ResNet method.

Facial Expression Recognition Using Enhanced Deep 3D Convolutional Neural Networks

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have shown to outperform traditional methods in various visual recognition tasks including Facial Expression Recognition (FER). In spite of efforts made to improve the accuracy of FER systems using DNN, existing methods still are not generalizable enough in practical applications. This paper proposes a 3D Convolutional Neural Network method for FER in videos. This new network architecture consists of 3D Inception-ResNet layers followed by an LSTM unit that together extracts the spatial relations within facial images as well as the temporal relations between different frames in the video. Facial landmark points are also used as inputs to our network which emphasize on the importance of facial components rather than the facial regions that may not contribute significantly to generating facial expressions. Our proposed method is evaluated using four publicly available databases in subject-independent and cross-database tasks and outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Spatio-Temporal Facial Expression Recognition Using Convolutional Neural Networks and Conditional Random Fields

Automated Facial Expression Recognition (FER) has been a challenging task for decades. Many of the existing works use hand-crafted features such as LBP, HOG, LPQ, and Histogram of Optical Flow (HOF) combined with classifiers such as Support Vector Machines for expression recognition. These methods often require rigorous hyperparameter tuning to achieve good results. Recently Deep Neural Networks (DNN) have shown to outperform traditional methods in visual object recognition. In this paper, we propose a two-part network consisting of a DNN-based architecture followed by a Conditional Random Field (CRF) module for facial expression recognition in videos. The first part captures the spatial relation within facial images using convolutional layers followed by three Inception-ResNet modules and two fully-connected layers. To capture the temporal relation between the image frames, we use linear chain CRF in the second part of our network. We evaluate our proposed network on three publicly available databases, viz. CK+, MMI, and FERA. Experiments are performed in subject-independent and cross-database manners. Our experimental results show that cascading the deep network architecture with the CRF module considerably increases the recognition of facial expressions in videos and in particular it outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in the cross-database experiments and yields comparable results in the subject-independent experiments.

Facial Expression Recognition from World Wild Web

Recognizing facial expression in a wild setting has remained a challenging task in computer vision. The World Wide Web is a good source of facial images which most of them are captured in uncontrolled conditions. In fact, the Internet is a Word Wild Web of facial images with expressions. This paper presents the results of a new study on collecting, annotating, and analyzing wild facial expressions from the web. Three search engines were queried using 1250 emotion related keywords in six different languages and the retrieved images were mapped by two annotators to six basic expressions and neutral. Deep neural networks and noise modeling were used in three different training scenarios to find how accurately facial expressions can be recognized when trained on noisy images collected from the web using query terms (e.g. happy face, laughing man, etc)? The results of our experiments show that deep neural networks can recognize wild facial expressions with an accuracy of 82.12%.

An FFT-based Synchronization Approach to Recognize Human Behaviors using STN-LFP Signal

Classification of human behavior is key to developing closed-loop Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) systems, which may be able to decrease the power consumption and side effects of the existing systems. Recent studies have shown that the Local Field Potential (LFP) signals from both Subthalamic Nuclei (STN) of the brain can be used to recognize human behavior. Since the DBS leads implanted in each STN can collect three bipolar signals, the selection of a suitable pair of LFPs that achieves optimal recognition performance is still an open problem to address. Considering the presence of synchronized aggregate activity in the basal ganglia, this paper presents an FFT-based synchronization approach to automatically select a relevant pair of LFPs and use the pair together with an SVM-based MKL classifier for behavior recognition purposes. Our experiments on five subjects show the superiority of the proposed approach compared to other methods used for behavior classification.

A Multiple Kernel Learning Approach for Human Behavioral Task Classification using STN-LFP Signal

Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) has gained increasing attention as an effective method to mitigate Parkinsons disease (PD) disorders. Existing DBS systems are open-loop such that the system parameters are not adjusted automatically based on patients behavior. Classification of human behavior is an important step in the design of the next generation of DBS systems that are closed-loop. This paper presents a classification approach to recognize such behavioral tasks using the subthalamic nucleus (STN) Local Field Potential (LFP) signals. In our approach, we use the time-frequency representation (spectrogram) of the raw LFP signals recorded from left and right STNs as the feature vectors. Then these features are combined together via Support Vector Machines (SVM) with Multiple Kernel Learning (MKL) formulation. The MKL-based classification method is utilized to classify different tasks: button press, mouth movement, speech, and arm movement. Our experiments show that the lp-norm MKL significantly outperforms single kernel SVM-based classifiers in classifying behavioral tasks of five subjects even using signals acquired with a low sampling rate of 10 Hz. This leads to a lower computational cost.

ExpressionBot: An Emotive Lifelike Robotic Face for Face-to-Face Communication

This article proposes an emotive lifelike robotic face, called ExpressionBot, that is designed to support verbal and non-verbal communication between the robot and humans, with the goal of closely modeling the dynamics of natural face-to-face communication. The proposed robotic head consists of two major components: 1) a hardware component that contains a small projector, a fish-eye lens, a custom-designed mask and a neck system with 3 degrees of freedom; 2) a facial animation system, projected onto the robotic mask, that is capable of presenting facial expressions, realistic eye movement, and accurate visual speech. We present three studies that compare Human-Robot Interaction with Human-Computer Interaction with a screen-based model of the avatar. The studies indicate that the robotic face is well accepted by users, with some advantages in recognition of facial expression and mutual eye gaze contact.

Bidirectional Warping of Active Appearance Model

Active Appearance Model (AAM) is a commonly used method for facial image analysis with applications in face identification and facial expression recognition. This paper proposes a new approach based on image alignment for AAM fitting called bidirectional warping. Previous approaches warp either the input image or the appearance template. We propose to warp both the input image, using incremental update by an affine transformation, and the appearance template, using an inverse compositional approach. Our experimental results on Multi-PIE face database show that the bidirectional approach outperforms state-of-the-art inverse compositional fitting approaches in extracting landmark points of faces with shape and pose variations.

Going Deeper in Facial Expression Recognition using Deep Neural Networks

Automated Facial Expression Recognition (FER) has remained a challenging and interesting problem. Despite efforts made in developing various methods for FER, existing approaches traditionally lack generalizability when applied to unseen images or those that are captured in wild setting. Most of the existing approaches are based on engineered features (e.g. HOG, LBPH, and Gabor) where the classifier's hyperparameters are tuned to give best recognition accuracies across a single database, or a small collection of similar databases. Nevertheless, the results are not significant when they are applied to novel data. This paper proposes a deep neural network architecture to address the FER problem across multiple well-known standard face datasets. Specifically, our network consists of two convolutional layers each followed by max pooling and then four Inception layers. The network is a single component architecture that takes registered facial images as the input and classifies them into either of the six basic or the neutral expressions. We conducted comprehensive experiments on seven publically available facial expression databases, viz. MultiPIE, MMI, CK+, DISFA, FERA, SFEW, and FER2013. The results of proposed architecture are comparable to or better than the state-of-the-art methods and better than traditional convolutional neural networks and in both accuracy and training time.