InterMulti:Multi-view Multimodal Interactions with Text-dominated Hierarchical High-order Fusion for Emotion Analysis

Humans are sophisticated at reading interlocutors' emotions from multimodal signals, such as speech contents, voice tones and facial expressions. However, machines might struggle to understand various emotions due to the difficulty of effectively decoding emotions from the complex interactions between multimodal signals. In this paper, we propose a multimodal emotion analysis framework, InterMulti, to capture complex multimodal interactions from different views and identify emotions from multimodal signals. Our proposed framework decomposes signals of different modalities into three kinds of multimodal interaction representations, including a modality-full interaction representation, a modality-shared interaction representation, and three modality-specific interaction representations. Additionally, to balance the contribution of different modalities and learn a more informative latent interaction representation, we developed a novel Text-dominated Hierarchical High-order Fusion(THHF) module. THHF module reasonably integrates the above three kinds of representations into a comprehensive multimodal interaction representation. Extensive experimental results on widely used datasets, (i.e.) MOSEI, MOSI and IEMOCAP, demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art.

Learning Vision Transformer with Squeeze and Excitation for Facial Expression Recognition

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 are limited compared to other vision applications. Therefore, we propose in this paper to learn a vision Transformer jointly with a Squeeze and Excitation (SE) block for FER task. The proposed method is evaluated on different publicly available FER databases including CK+, JAFFE,RAF-DB and SFEW. Experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on CK+ and SFEW and achieves competitive results on JAFFE and RAF-DB.

FP-Age: Leveraging Face Parsing Attention for Facial Age Estimation in the Wild

Image-based age estimation aims to predict a person's age from facial images. It is used in a variety of real-world applications. Although end-to-end deep models have achieved impressive results for age estimation on benchmark datasets, their performance in-the-wild still leaves much room for improvement due to the challenges caused by large variations in head pose, facial expressions, and occlusions. To address this issue, we propose a simple yet effective method to explicitly incorporate facial semantics into age estimation, so that the model would learn to correctly focus on the most informative facial components from unaligned facial images regardless of head pose and non-rigid deformation. To this end, we design a face parsing-based network to learn semantic information at different scales and a novel face parsing attention module to leverage these semantic features for age estimation. To evaluate our method on in-the-wild data, we also introduce a new challenging large-scale benchmark called IMDB-Clean. This dataset is created by semi-automatically cleaning the noisy IMDB-WIKI dataset using a constrained clustering method. Through comprehensive experiment on IMDB-Clean and other benchmark datasets, under both intra-dataset and cross-dataset evaluation protocols, we show that our method consistently outperforms all existing age estimation methods and achieves a new state-of-the-art performance. To the best of our knowledge, our work presents the first attempt of leveraging face parsing attention to achieve semantic-aware age estimation, which may be inspiring to other high level facial analysis tasks.

Magnifying Subtle Facial Motions for Effective 4D Expression Recognition

In this paper, an effective pipeline to automatic 4D Facial Expression Recognition (4D FER) is proposed. It combines two growing but disparate ideas in Computer Vision -- computing the spatial facial deformations using tools from Riemannian geometry and magnifying them using temporal filtering. The flow of 3D faces is first analyzed to capture the spatial deformations based on the recently-developed Riemannian approach, where registration and comparison of neighboring 3D faces are led jointly. Then, the obtained temporal evolution of these deformations are fed into a magnification method in order to amplify the facial activities over the time. The latter, main contribution of this paper, allows revealing subtle (hidden) deformations which enhance the emotion classification performance. We evaluated our approach on BU-4DFE dataset, the state-of-art 94.18% average performance and an improvement that exceeds 10% in classification accuracy, after magnifying extracted geometric features (deformations), are achieved.

Mask-FPAN: Semi-Supervised Face Parsing in the Wild With De-Occlusion and UV GAN

Fine-grained semantic segmentation of a person's face and head, including facial parts and head components, has progressed a great deal in recent years. However, it remains a challenging task, whereby considering ambiguous occlusions and large pose variations are particularly difficult. To overcome these difficulties, we propose a novel framework termed Mask-FPAN. It uses a de-occlusion module that learns to parse occluded faces in a semi-supervised way. In particular, face landmark localization, face occlusionstimations, and detected head poses are taken into account. A 3D morphable face model combined with the UV GAN improves the robustness of 2D face parsing. In addition, we introduce two new datasets named FaceOccMask-HQ and CelebAMaskOcc-HQ for face paring work. The proposed Mask-FPAN framework addresses the face parsing problem in the wild and shows significant performance improvements with MIOU from 0.7353 to 0.9013 compared to the state-of-the-art on challenging face datasets.

Exploring Workplace Behaviors through Speaking Patterns using Large-scale Multimodal Wearable Recordings: A Study of Healthcare Providers

Interpersonal spoken communication is central to human interaction and the exchange of information. Such interactive processes involve not only speech and spoken language but also non-verbal cues such as hand gestures, facial expressions, and nonverbal vocalization, that are used to express feelings and provide feedback. These multimodal communication signals carry a variety of information about the people: traits like gender and age as well as about physical and psychological states and behavior. This work uses wearable multimodal sensors to investigate interpersonal communication behaviors focusing on speaking patterns among healthcare providers with a focus on nurses. We analyze longitudinal data collected from $99$ nurses in a large hospital setting over ten weeks. The results indicate that speaking pattern differences across shift schedules and working units. Moreover, results show that speaking patterns combined with physiological measures can be used to predict affect measures and life satisfaction scores. The implementation of this work can be accessed at https://github.com/usc-sail/tiles-audio-arousal.

Controllable Face Manipulation and UV Map Generation by Self-supervised Learning

Although manipulating facial attributes by Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) has been remarkably successful recently, there are still some challenges in explicit control of features such as pose, expression, lighting, etc. Recent methods achieve explicit control over 2D images by combining 2D generative model and 3DMM. However, due to the lack of realism and clarity in texture reconstruction by 3DMM, there is a domain gap between the synthetic image and the rendered image of 3DMM. Since rendered 3DMM images contain facial region only without the background, directly computing the loss between these two domains is not ideal and the resultant trained model will be biased. In this study, we propose to explicitly edit the latent space of the pretrained StyleGAN by controlling the parameters of the 3DMM. To address the domain gap problem, we propose a noval network called 'Map and edit' and a simple but effective attribute editing method to avoid direct loss computation between rendered and synthesized images. Furthermore, since our model can accurately generate multi-view face images while the identity remains unchanged. As a by-product, combined with visibility masks, our proposed model can also generate texture-rich and high-resolution UV facial textures. Our model relies on pretrained StyleGAN, and the proposed model is trained in a self-supervised manner without any manual annotations or datasets.

Facial Expressions as a Vulnerability in Face Recognition

This work explores facial expression bias as a security vulnerability of face recognition systems. Face recognition technology has experienced great advances during the last decades. However, despite the great performance achieved by state of the art face recognition systems, the algorithms are still sensitive to a large range of covariates. This work presents a comprehensive analysis of how facial expression bias impacts the performance of face recognition technologies. Our study analyzes: i) facial expression biases in the most popular face recognition databases; and ii) the impact of facial expression in face recognition performances. Our experimental framework includes four face detectors, three face recognition models, and four different databases. Our results demonstrate a huge facial expression bias in the most widely used databases, as well as a related impact of face expression in the performance of state-of-the-art algorithms. This work opens the door to new research lines focused on mitigating the observed vulnerability.

Video-based Facial Micro-Expression Analysis: A Survey of Datasets, Features and Algorithms

Unlike the conventional facial expressions, micro-expressions are involuntary and transient facial expressions capable of revealing the genuine emotions that people attempt to hide. Therefore, they can provide important information in a broad range of applications such as lie detection, criminal detection, etc. Since micro-expressions are transient and of low intensity, however, their detection and recognition is difficult and relies heavily on expert experiences. Due to its intrinsic particularity and complexity, video-based micro-expression analysis is attractive but challenging, and has recently become an active area of research. Although there have been numerous developments in this area, thus far there has been no comprehensive survey that provides researchers with a systematic overview of these developments with a unified evaluation. Accordingly, in this survey paper, we first highlight the key differences between macro- and micro-expressions, then use these differences to guide our research survey of video-based micro-expression analysis in a cascaded structure, encompassing the neuropsychological basis, datasets, features, spotting algorithms, recognition algorithms, applications and evaluation of state-of-the-art approaches. For each aspect, the basic techniques, advanced developments and major challenges are addressed and discussed. Furthermore, after considering the limitations of existing micro-expression datasets, we present and release a new dataset - called micro-and-macro expression warehouse (MMEW) - containing more video samples and more labeled emotion types. We then perform a unified comparison of representative methods on CAS(ME)2 for spotting, and on MMEW and SAMM for recognition, respectively. Finally, some potential future research directions are explored and outlined.