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1. Three stream graph attention network using dynamic patch selection for the classification of micro-expressions

   Kumar, Ankit; Bhanu, Bir (June 2022, IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshop)

   To understand the genuine emotions expressed by humans during social interactions, it is necessary to recognize the subtle changes on the face (micro-expressions) demonstrated by an individual. Facial micro-expressions are brief, rapid, spontaneous gestures and non-voluntary facial muscle movements beneath the skin. Therefore, it is a challenging task to classify facial micro-expressions. This paper presents an end-to-end novel three-stream graph attention network model to capture the subtle changes on the face and recognize micro-expressions (MEs) by exploiting the relationship between optical flow magnitude, optical flow direction, and the node locations features. A facial graph representational structure is used to extract the spatial and temporal information using three frames. The varying dynamic patch size of optical flow features is used to extract the local texture information across each landmark point. The network only utilizes the landmark points location features and optical flow information across these points and generates good results for the classification of MEs. A comprehensive evaluation of SAMM and the CASME II datasets demonstrates the high efficacy, efficiency, and generalizability of the proposed approach and achieves better results than the state-of-the-art methods. 

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2. Multi-Modal Multi-Channel American Sign Language Recognition

   https://doi.org/10.1142/S2972335324500017  

   Vahdani, Elahe; Jing, Longlong; Huenerfauth, Matt; Tian, Yingli (March 2024, International Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Research)

   In this paper, we propose a machine learning-based multi-stream framework to recognize American Sign Language (ASL) manual signs and nonmanual gestures (face and head movements) in real time from RGB-D videos. Our approach is based on 3D Convolutional Neural Networks (3D CNNs) by fusing the multi-modal features including hand gestures, facial expressions, and body poses from multiple channels (RGB, Depth, Motion, and Skeleton joints). To learn the overall temporal dynamics in a video, a proxy video is generated by selecting a subset of frames for each video which are then used to train the proposed 3D CNN model. We collected a new ASL dataset, ASL-100-RGBD, which contains 42 RGB-D videos captured by a Microsoft Kinect V2 camera. Each video consists of 100 ASL manual signs, along with RGB channel, Depth maps, Skeleton joints, Face features, and HD face. The dataset is fully annotated for each semantic region (i.e. the time duration of each sign that the human signer performs). Our proposed method achieves 92.88% accuracy for recognizing 100 ASL sign glosses in our newly collected ASL-100-RGBD dataset. The effectiveness of our framework for recognizing hand gestures from RGB-D videos is further demonstrated on a large-scale dataset, ChaLearn IsoGD, achieving the state-of-the-art results. 

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3. Micro-Expression Classification based on Landmark Relations with Graph Attention Convolutional Network

   Kumar, Ankith Jain; Bhanu, Bir (June 2021, Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops)

   null (Ed.)

   Facial micro-expressions are brief, rapid, spontaneous gestures of the facial muscles that express an individual's genuine emotions. Because of their short duration and subtlety, detecting and classifying these micro-expressions by humans and machines is difficult. In this paper, a novel approach is proposed that exploits relationships between landmark points and the optical flow patch for the given landmark points. It consists of a two-stream graph attention convolutional network that extracts the relationships between the landmark points and local texture using an optical flow patch. A graph structure is built to draw out temporal information using the triplet of frames. One stream is for node feature location, and the other one is for a patch of optical-flow information. These two streams (node location stream and optical flow stream) are fused for classification. The results are shown on, CASME II and SAMM, publicly available datasets, for three classes and five classes of micro-expressions. The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for 3 and 5 categories of expressions. 

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4. FineFACE: Fair Facial Attribute Classification Leveraging Fine-grained Features

   Manzoor, Ayesha; Rattani, Ajita (September 2024, International Conference on Pattern Recognition)

   Published research highlights the presence of demographic bias in automated facial attribute classification algorithms, particularly impacting women and individuals with darker skin tones. Existing bias mitigation techniques typically require demographic annotations and often obtain a trade-off between fairness and accuracy, i.e., Pareto inefficiency. Facial attributes, whether common ones like gender or others such as "chubby" or "high cheekbones", exhibit high interclass similarity and intraclass variation across demographics leading to unequal accuracy. This requires the use of local and subtle cues using fine-grained analysis for differentiation. This paper proposes a novel approach to fair facial attribute classification by framing it as a fine-grained classification problem. Our approach effectively integrates both low-level local features (like edges and color) and high-level semantic features (like shapes and structures) through cross-layer mutual attention learning. Here, shallow to deep CNN layers function as experts, offering category predictions and attention regions. An exhaustive evaluation on facial attribute annotated datasets demonstrates that our FineFACE model improves accuracy by $$1.32\%$$ to $$1.74\%$$ and fairness by $$67\%$$ to $$83.6\%$$, over the SOTA bias mitigation techniques. Importantly, our approach obtains a Pareto-efficient balance between accuracy and fairness between demographic groups. In addition, our approach does not require demographic annotations and is applicable to diverse downstream classification tasks. To facilitate reproducibility, the code and dataset information is available at~\url{https://github.com/VCBSL-Fairness/FineFACE}. 

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5. Py-Feat: Python Facial Expression Analysis Toolbox

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-023-00191-4  

   Cheong, Jin Hyun; Jolly, Eshin; Xie, Tiankang; Byrne, Sophie; Kenney, Matthew; Chang, Luke J. (December 2023, Affective Science)

   Abstract Studying facial expressions is a notoriously difficult endeavor. Recent advances in the field of affective computing have yielded impressive progress in automatically detecting facial expressions from pictures and videos. However, much of this work has yet to be widely disseminated in social science domains such as psychology. Current state-of-the-art models require considerable domain expertise that is not traditionally incorporated into social science training programs. Furthermore, there is a notable absence of user-friendly and open-source software that provides a comprehensive set of tools and functions that support facial expression research. In this paper, we introduce Py-Feat, an open-source Python toolbox that provides support for detecting, preprocessing, analyzing, and visualizing facial expression data. Py-Feat makes it easy for domain experts to disseminate and benchmark computer vision models and also for end users to quickly process, analyze, and visualize face expression data. We hope this platform will facilitate increased use of facial expression data in human behavior research. 

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