Benchmarking Deep Facial Expression Recognition: An Extensive Protocol with Balanced Dataset in the Wild

Facial expression recognition (FER) is a crucial part of human-computer interaction. Existing FER methods achieve high accuracy and generalization based on different open-source deep models and training approaches. However, the performance of these methods is not always good when encountering practical settings, which are seldom explored. In this paper, we collected a new in-the-wild facial expression dataset for cross-domain validation. Twenty-three commonly used network architectures were implemented and evaluated following a uniform protocol. Moreover, various setups, in terms of input resolutions, class balance management, and pre-trained strategies, were verified to show the corresponding performance contribution. Based on extensive experiments on three large-scale FER datasets and our practical cross-validation, we ranked network architectures and summarized a set of recommendations on deploying deep FER methods in real scenarios. In addition, potential ethical rules, privacy issues, and regulations were discussed in practical FER applications such as marketing, education, and entertainment business.

Uncertain Facial Expression Recognition via Multi-task Assisted Correction

Deep models for facial expression recognition achieve high performance by training on large-scale labeled data. However, publicly available datasets contain uncertain facial expressions caused by ambiguous annotations or confusing emotions, which could severely decline the robustness. Previous studies usually follow the bias elimination method in general tasks without considering the uncertainty problem from the perspective of different corresponding sources. In this paper, we propose a novel method of multi-task assisted correction in addressing uncertain facial expression recognition called MTAC. Specifically, a confidence estimation block and a weighted regularization module are applied to highlight solid samples and suppress uncertain samples in every batch. In addition, two auxiliary tasks, i.e., action unit detection and valence-arousal measurement, are introduced to learn semantic distributions from a data-driven AU graph and mitigate category imbalance based on latent dependencies between discrete and continuous emotions, respectively. Moreover, a re-labeling strategy guided by feature-level similarity constraint further generates new labels for identified uncertain samples to promote model learning. The proposed method can flexibly combine with existing frameworks in a fully-supervised or weakly-supervised manner. Experiments on RAF-DB, AffectNet, and AffWild2 datasets demonstrate that the MTAC obtains substantial improvements over baselines when facing synthetic and real uncertainties and outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

Uncertain Label Correction via Auxiliary Action Unit Graphs for Facial Expression Recognition

High-quality annotated images are significant to deep facial expression recognition (FER) methods. However, uncertain labels, mostly existing in large-scale public datasets, often mislead the training process. In this paper, we achieve uncertain label correction of facial expressions using auxiliary action unit (AU) graphs, called ULC-AG. Specifically, a weighted regularization module is introduced to highlight valid samples and suppress category imbalance in every batch. Based on the latent dependency between emotions and AUs, an auxiliary branch using graph convolutional layers is added to extract the semantic information from graph topologies. Finally, a re-labeling strategy corrects the ambiguous annotations by comparing their feature similarities with semantic templates. Experiments show that our ULC-AG achieves 89.31% and 61.57% accuracy on RAF-DB and AffectNet datasets, respectively, outperforming the baseline and state-of-the-art methods.