Context-sensitive dynamic ordinal regression for intensity estimation of facial action units
File(s)tpamicscorffinal_rudovic.pdf (1.39 MB)
Accepted version
Author(s)
Rudovic, O
Pavlovic, V
Pantic, M
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Modeling intensity of facial action units from spontaneously displayed facial expressions is challenging mainly because of high variability in subject-specific facial expressiveness, head-movements, illumination changes, etc. These factors make the target problem highly context-sensitive. However, existing methods usually ignore this context-sensitivity of the target problem. We propose a novel Conditional Ordinal Random Field (CORF) model for context-sensitive modeling of the facial action unit intensity, where the W5+ (who, when, what, where, why and how) definition of the context is used. While the proposed model is general enough to handle all six context questions, in this paper we focus on the context questions: who (the observed subject), how (the changes in facial expressions), and when (the timing of facial expressions and their intensity). The context questions who and howare modeled by means of the newly introduced context-dependent covariate effects, and the context question when is modeled in terms of temporal correlation between the ordinal outputs, i.e., intensity levels of action units. We also introduce a weighted softmax-margin learning of CRFs from data with skewed distribution of the intensity levels, which is commonly encountered in spontaneous facial data. The proposed model is evaluated on intensity estimation of pain and facial action units using two recently published datasets (UNBC Shoulder Pain and DISFA) of spontaneously displayed facial expressions. Our experiments show that the proposed model performs significantly better on the target tasks compared to the state-of-the-art approaches. Furthermore, compared to traditional learning of CRFs, we show that the proposed weighted learning results in more robust parameter estimation from the imbalanced intensity data.
Date Issued
2015-05-01
Date Acceptance
2014-08-24
Citation
IEEE transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 2015, 37 (5), pp.944-958
ISSN
2160-9292
Publisher
IEEE
Start Page
944
End Page
958
Journal / Book Title
IEEE transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
Volume
37
Issue
5
Copyright Statement
© 2015 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
Sponsor
Commission of the European Communities
Identifier
http://gateway.webofknowledge.com/gateway/Gateway.cgi?GWVersion=2&SrcApp=PARTNER_APP&SrcAuth=LinksAMR&KeyUT=WOS:000352533000004&DestLinkType=FullRecord&DestApp=ALL_WOS&UsrCustomerID=1ba7043ffcc86c417c072aa74d649202
Grant Number
611153
Subjects
Science & Technology
Technology
Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence
Engineering, Electrical & Electronic
Computer Science
Engineering
FACS
action unit intensity
spontaneous facial behavior
facial expression analysis
ordinal regression
conditional random fields
context modeling
CONDITIONAL RANDOM-FIELDS
MODELS
RECOGNITION
DELIBERATE
EXPRESSION
BEHAVIOR
MACHINE
Publication Status
Published
Date Publish Online
2014-09-08