Xiaoyu Mi

Junya Saito, Xiaoyu Mi, Akiyoshi Uchida et al.

Facial Action Units (AUs) represent a set of facial muscular activities and various combinations of AUs can represent a wide range of emotions. AU recognition is often used in many applications, including marketing, healthcare, education, and so forth. Although a lot of studies have developed various methods to improve recognition accuracy, it still remains a major challenge for AU recognition. In the Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) 2020 competition, we proposed a new automatic Action Units (AUs) recognition method using a pairwise deep architecture to derive the Pseudo-Intensities of each AU and then convert them into predicted intensities. This year, we introduced a new technique to last year's framework to further reduce AU recognition errors due to temporary face occlusion such as hands on face or large face orientation. We obtained a score of 0.65 in the validation data set for this year's competition.

Sachihiro Youoku, Takahisa Yamamoto, Junya Saito et al.

Human affective recognition is an important factor in human-computer interaction. However, the method development with in-the-wild data is not yet accurate enough for practical usage. In this paper, we introduce the affective recognition method focusing on facial expression (EXP) and valence-arousal calculation that was submitted to the Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) 2021 Contest. When annotating facial expressions from a video, we thought that it would be judged not only from the features common to all people, but also from the relative changes in the time series of individuals. Therefore, after learning the common features for each frame, we constructed a facial expression estimation model and valence-arousal model using time-series data after combining the common features and the standardized features for each video. Furthermore, the above features were learned using multi-modal data such as image features, AU, Head pose, and Gaze. In the validation set, our model achieved a facial expression score of 0.546. These verification results reveal that our proposed framework can improve estimation accuracy and robustness effectively.

Junya Saito, Ryosuke Kawamura, Akiyoshi Uchida et al.

In this paper, we propose a new automatic Action Units (AUs) recognition method used in a competition, Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW). Our method tackles a problem of AUs label inconsistency among subjects by using pairwise deep architecture. While the baseline score is 0.31, our method achieved 0.67 in validation dataset of the competition.

Sachihiro Youoku, Yuushi Toyoda, Takahisa Yamamoto et al.

Human affective recognition is an important factor in human-computer interaction. However, the method development with in-the-wild data is not yet accurate enough for practical usage. In this paper, we introduce the affective recognition method focusing on valence-arousal (VA) and expression (EXP) that was submitted to the Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) 2020 Contest. Since we considered that affective behaviors have many observable features that have their own time frames, we introduced multiple optimized time windows (short-term, middle-term, and long-term) into our analyzing framework for extracting feature parameters from video data. Moreover, multiple modality data are used, including action units, head poses, gaze, posture, and ResNet 50 or Efficient NET features, and are optimized during the extraction of these features. Then, we generated affective recognition models for each time window and ensembled these models together. Also, we fussed the valence, arousal, and expression models together to enable the multi-task learning, considering the fact that the basic psychological states behind facial expressions are closely related to each another. In the validation set, our model achieved a valence-arousal score of 0.498 and a facial expression score of 0.471. These verification results reveal that our proposed framework can improve estimation accuracy and robustness effectively.

Ziqiang Shi, Liu Liu, Zhongling Liu et al.

The detection of facial action units (AUs) has been studied as it has the competition due to the wide-ranging applications thereof. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for the AU detection from a single input image by grasping the \textbf{c}o-\textbf{o}ccurrence and \textbf{m}utual \textbf{ex}clusion (COMEX) as well as the intensity distribution among AUs. Our algorithm uses facial landmarks to detect the features of local AUs. The features are input to a bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) layer for learning the intensity distribution. Afterwards, the new AU feature continuously passed through a self-attention encoding layer and a continuous-state modern Hopfield layer for learning the COMEX relationships. Our experiments on the challenging BP4D and DISFA benchmarks without any external data or pre-trained models yield F1-scores of 63.7\% and 61.8\% respectively, which shows our proposed networks can lead to performance improvement in the AU detection task.