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Reconstructing 3D faces with facial geometry from single images has allowed for major advances in animation, generative models, and virtual reality. However, this ability to represent faces with their 3D features is not as fully explored by the facial expression inference (FEI) community. This study therefore aims to investigate the impacts of integrating such 3D representations into the FEI task, specifically for facial expression classification and face-based valence-arousal (VA) estimation. To accomplish this, we first assess the performance of two 3D face representations (both based on the 3D morphable model, FLAME) for the FEI tasks. We further explore two fusion architectures, intermediate fusion and late fusion, for integrating the 3D face representations with existing 2D inference frameworks. To evaluate our proposed architecture, we extract the corresponding 3D representations and perform extensive tests on the AffectNet and RAF-DB datasets. Our experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art AffectNet VA estimation and RAF-DB classification tasks. Moreover, our method can act as a complement to other existing methods to boost performance in many emotion inference tasks.
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FACIAL GRID TRANSFORMATION: A NOVEL FACE REGISTRATION APPROACH FOR IMPROVING FACIAL ACTION UNIT RECOGNITION
Face registration is a major and critical step for face analysis. Existing facial activity recognition systems often employ coarse face alignment based on a few fiducial points such as eyes and extract features from equal-sized grid. Such extracted features are susceptible to variations in face pose, facial deformation, and person-specific geometry. In this work, we propose a novel face registration method named facial grid transformation to improve feature extraction for recognizing facial Action Units (AUs). Based on the transformed grid, novel grid edge features are developed to capture local facial motions related to AUs. Extensive experiments on two wellknown AU-coded databases have demonstrated that the proposed method yields significant improvements over the methods based on equal-sized grid on both posed and more importantly, spontaneous facial displays. Furthermore, the proposed method also outperforms the state-of-the-art methods using either coarse alignment or mesh-based face registration.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1149787
- PAR ID:
- 10015083
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings - International Conference on Image Processing
- ISSN:
- 1522-4880
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/ICIP.2014.7025283
