Deep Learning for Domain Adaption: Engagement Recognition

Engagement is a key indicator of the quality of learning experience, and one that plays a major role in developing intelligent educational interfaces. Any such interface requires the ability to recognise the level of engagement in order to respond appropriately; however, there is very little existing data to learn from, and new data is expensive and difficult to acquire. This paper presents a deep learning model to improve engagement recognition from face images captured `in the wild' that overcomes the data sparsity challenge by pre-training on readily available basic facial expression data, before training on specialised engagement data. In the first of two steps, a state-of-the-art facial expression recognition model is trained to provide a rich face representation using deep learning. In the second step, we use the model's weights to initialize our deep learning based model to recognize engagement; we term this the Transfer model. We train the model on our new engagement recognition (ER) dataset with 4627 engaged and disengaged samples. We find that our Transfer architecture outperforms standard deep learning architectures that we apply for the first time to engagement recognition, as well as approaches using HOG features and SVMs. The model achieves a classification accuracy of 72.38%, which is 6.1% better than the best baseline model on the test set of the ER dataset. Using the F1 measure and the area under the ROC curve, our Transfer model achieves 73.90% and 73.74%, exceeding the best baseline model by 3.49% and 5.33% respectively.