Multi-label Learning with Missing Values using Combined Facial Action Unit Datasets
This work addresses the challenge of data scarcity and missing labels in multi-label learning for facial action unit detection, which is important for emotion analysis in human-computer interaction, but it is incremental as it builds on existing methods for handling missing data.
The paper tackles the problem of scarce and inconsistently annotated data for facial action unit detection by combining multiple datasets, which results in many missing labels, and presents an algorithm that learns without inferring missing values, achieving competitive performance in recent action unit detection competitions.
Facial action units allow an objective, standardized description of facial micro movements which can be used to describe emotions in human faces. Annotating data for action units is an expensive and time-consuming task, which leads to a scarce data situation. By combining multiple datasets from different studies, the amount of training data for a machine learning algorithm can be increased in order to create robust models for automated, multi-label action unit detection. However, every study annotates different action units, leading to a tremendous amount of missing labels in a combined database. In this work, we examine this challenge and present our approach to create a combined database and an algorithm capable of learning under the presence of missing labels without inferring their values. Our approach shows competitive performance compared to recent competitions in action unit detection.