Ensemble of Hankel Matrices for Face Emotion Recognition

In this paper, a face emotion is considered as the result of the composition of multiple concurrent signals, each corresponding to the movements of a specific facial muscle. These concurrent signals are represented by means of a set of multi-scale appearance features that might be correlated with one or more concurrent signals. The extraction of these appearance features from a sequence of face images yields to a set of time series. This paper proposes to use the dynamics regulating each appearance feature time series to recognize among different face emotions. To this purpose, an ensemble of Hankel matrices corresponding to the extracted time series is used for emotion classification within a framework that combines nearest neighbor and a majority vote schema. Experimental results on a public available dataset shows that the adopted representation is promising and yields state-of-the-art accuracy in emotion classification.Comment: Paper to appear in Proc. of ICIAP 2015. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1506.0500

Robust subspace learning for static and dynamic affect and behaviour modelling

Machine analysis of human affect and behavior in naturalistic contexts has witnessed a growing attention in the last decade from various disciplines ranging from social and cognitive sciences to machine learning and computer vision. Endowing machines with the ability to seamlessly detect, analyze, model, predict as well as simulate and synthesize manifestations of internal emotional and behavioral states in real-world data is deemed essential for the deployment of next-generation, emotionally- and socially-competent human-centered interfaces. In this thesis, we are primarily motivated by the problem of modeling, recognizing and predicting spontaneous expressions of non-verbal human affect and behavior manifested through either low-level facial attributes in static images or high-level semantic events in image sequences. Both visual data and annotations of naturalistic affect and behavior naturally contain noisy measurements of unbounded magnitude at random locations, commonly referred to as ‘outliers’. We present here machine learning methods that are robust to such gross, sparse noise. First, we deal with static analysis of face images, viewing the latter as a superposition of mutually-incoherent, low-complexity components corresponding to facial attributes, such as facial identity, expressions and activation of atomic facial muscle actions. We develop a robust, discriminant dictionary learning framework to extract these components from grossly corrupted training data and combine it with sparse representation to recognize the associated attributes. We demonstrate that our framework can jointly address interrelated classification tasks such as face and facial expression recognition. Inspired by the well-documented importance of the temporal aspect in perceiving affect and behavior, we direct the bulk of our research efforts into continuous-time modeling of dimensional affect and social behavior. Having identified a gap in the literature which is the lack of data containing annotations of social attitudes in continuous time and scale, we first curate a new audio-visual database of multi-party conversations from political debates annotated frame-by-frame in terms of real-valued conflict intensity and use it to conduct the first study on continuous-time conflict intensity estimation. Our experimental findings corroborate previous evidence indicating the inability of existing classifiers in capturing the hidden temporal structures of affective and behavioral displays. We present here a novel dynamic behavior analysis framework which models temporal dynamics in an explicit way, based on the natural assumption that continuous- time annotations of smoothly-varying affect or behavior can be viewed as outputs of a low-complexity linear dynamical system when behavioral cues (features) act as system inputs. A novel robust structured rank minimization framework is proposed to estimate the system parameters in the presence of gross corruptions and partially missing data. Experiments on prediction of dimensional conflict and affect as well as multi-object tracking from detection validate the effectiveness of our predictive framework and demonstrate that for the first time that complex human behavior and affect can be learned and predicted based on small training sets of person(s)-specific observations.Open Acces

Cross-Subject Emotion Recognition with Sparsely-Labeled Peripheral Physiological Data Using SHAP-Explained Tree Ensembles

There are still many challenges of emotion recognition using physiological data despite the substantial progress made recently. In this paper, we attempted to address two major challenges. First, in order to deal with the sparsely-labeled physiological data, we first decomposed the raw physiological data using signal spectrum analysis, based on which we extracted both complexity and energy features. Such a procedure helped reduce noise and improve feature extraction effectiveness. Second, in order to improve the explainability of the machine learning models in emotion recognition with physiological data, we proposed Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LightGBM) and SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) for emotion prediction and model explanation, respectively. The LightGBM model outperformed the eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) model on the public Database for Emotion Analysis using Physiological signals (DEAP) with f1-scores of 0.814, 0.823, and 0.860 for binary classification of valence, arousal, and liking, respectively, with cross-subject validation using eight peripheral physiological signals. Furthermore, the SHAP model was able to identify the most important features in emotion recognition, and revealed the relationships between the predictor variables and the response variables in terms of their main effects and interaction effects. Therefore, the results of the proposed model not only had good performance using peripheral physiological data, but also gave more insights into the underlying mechanisms in recognizing emotions

Dynamic difficulty awareness training for continuous emotion prediction

Time-continuous emotion prediction has become an increasingly compelling task in machine learning. Considerable efforts have been made to advance the performance of these systems. Nonetheless, the main focus has been the development of more sophisticated models and the incorporation of different expressive modalities (e.g., speech, face, and physiology). In this paper, motivated by the benefit of difficulty awareness in a human learning procedure, we propose a novel machine learning framework, namely, Dynamic Difficulty Awareness Training (DDAT), which sheds fresh light on the research - directly exploiting the difficulties in learning to boost the machine learning process. The DDAT framework consists of two stages: information retrieval and information exploitation. In the first stage, we make use of the reconstruction error of input features or the annotation uncertainty to estimate the difficulty of learning specific information. The obtained difficulty level is then used in tandem with original features to update the model input in a second learning stage with the expectation that the model can learn to focus on high difficulty regions of the learning process. We perform extensive experiments on a benchmark database (RECOLA) to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. The experimental results show that our approach outperforms related baselines as well as other well-established time-continuous emotion prediction systems, which suggests that dynamically integrating the difficulty information for neural networks can help enhance the learning process

A dataset of annotated omnidirectional videos for distancing applications

Omnidirectional (or 360◦ ) cameras are acquisition devices that, in the next few years, could have a big impact on video surveillance applications, research, and industry, as they can record a spherical view of a whole environment from every perspective. This paper presents two new contributions to the research community: the CVIP360 dataset, an annotated dataset of 360◦ videos for distancing applications, and a new method to estimate the distances of objects in a scene from a single 360◦ image. The CVIP360 dataset includes 16 videos acquired outdoors and indoors, annotated by adding information about the pedestrians in the scene (bounding boxes) and the distances to the camera of some points in the 3D world by using markers at fixed and known intervals. The proposed distance estimation algorithm is based on geometry facts regarding the acquisition process of the omnidirectional device, and is uncalibrated in practice: the only required parameter is the camera height. The proposed algorithm was tested on the CVIP360 dataset, and empirical results demonstrate that the estimation error is negligible for distancing applications

Kısmi ve tam yüz görüntüleri üzerinde makine öğrenmesi yöntemleriyle yüz ifadesi tespiti

06.03.2018 tarihli ve 30352 sayılı Resmi Gazetede yayımlanan “Yükseköğretim Kanunu İle Bazı Kanun Ve Kanun Hükmünde Kararnamelerde Değişiklik Yapılması Hakkında Kanun” ile 18.06.2018 tarihli “Lisansüstü Tezlerin Elektronik Ortamda Toplanması, Düzenlenmesi ve Erişime Açılmasına İlişkin Yönerge” gereğince tam metin erişime açılmıştır.Yüz ifadeleri insanlar arası iletişimin önemli bir parçası olduğu gibi insan makine etkileşiminde de önemli rol oynamaktadır. Suçlu tespiti, sürücü dikkatinin izlenmesi, hasta takibi gibi önemli konularda karar vermede yüz ifadesi tespiti kullanılmaktadır. Bu sebeple, yüz ifadelerinin sistemler aracılığı ile otomatik tespiti popüler bir makine öğrenmesi çalışma alanıdır. Bu tez çalışmasında yüz ifadesi sınıflandırma çalışmaları yapılmıştır. Yapılan yüz ifadesi tespiti uygulamaları genel olarak iki başlık altında toplanabilir. Bunlardan ilki kısmi yüz görüntülerinin klasik makine öğrenmesi yöntemleriyle analizi ve ikincisi ise tüm yüz görüntülerinin derin öğrenme yöntemleri ile analiz edilmesidir. Geliştirilen ilk uygulamada, yüz görüntülerinden duygu tespiti için literatürdeki çalışmalardan farklı olarak sadece göz ve kaşların bulunduğu bölgeler kullanılarak sınıflandırma yapılmış ve yüksek başarım elde edilmiştir. Önerilen bu yöntem sayesinde yüz ifadesi tespitleri alt yüz kapanmalarından veya ağız hareketlerinden etkilenmeyecek, gürbüz özniteliklerin seçimi ile daha az öznitelikle sınırlı kaynaklara sahip cihazlarda çalışabilecek niteliktedir. Ayrıca önerilen sistemin genelleme yeteneğinin yüksek olduğu karşılaştırmalı olarak deneysel çalışmalarla ortaya konulmuştur. Tez kapsamında yapılan diğer yüz ifadesi sınıflandırma çalışmaları tüm yüz görüntüleri kullanılarak derin öğrenme yöntemleri ile gerçeklenmiştir. Önerilen yaklaşımlardan birisi yüz bölütleme çalışmasıdır. Bu çalışmalar ile elde edilen bölütlenmiş görüntüde yüz ifadesi ile ilgili öznitelikler korunmakta, kişisel herhangi bir veri saklanmamakta ve böylece kişisel gizlilik de korunmuş olmaktadır. Ayrıca bölütlenmiş görüntü ile orijinal yüz görüntüsünün birleşimi; yüz ifadesi için önemli olan kaş, göz ve ağız bölgelerine odaklanılarak yüz ifadelerinin tanınma başarımının arttırılması sağlamıştır.Facial expressions are important for interpersonal communication also play an important role in human machine interaction. Facial expressions are used in many areas such as criminal detection, driver attention monitoring, patient monitoring. Therefore, automatic facial expression recognition systems are a popular machine learning problem. In this thesis study, facial expression recognition studies are performed. In general, the applications of facial expression recognition can be grouped under two topic in this thesis: analysis of partial facial images with classical machine learning methods and analysis of whole facial images with deep learning methods. In the first application, classification of the facial expressions from facial images was performed using only eye and eyebrows regions. This approach is different from the studies which are studied facial expression recognition in the literature and high success rate was achieved. With this approach, proposed system is more robust for under facial occlusions and mouth motion during speech. Further, according to our experiments, the generalization ability of the proposed system is high. In this thesis, the rest of the facial expression recognition applications was developed with whole face images using deep learning techniques. One of the proposed methods is segmentation of facial parts with CNN. After segmentation process, facial segmented images were obtained. With this segmented images, personal privacy is protected because the segmented images don't include any personal information. Also, the success rate of the classification was increased with combining original raw image and segmented image. Because; eyes, eyebrows and mouth are crucial for facial expression recognition and segmented images have these areas. Therefore, the proposed CNN architecture for classification forces the earlier layers of the CNN system to learn to detect and localize the facial regions, thus providing decoupled and guided training

Magnetoencephalography

This is a practical book on MEG that covers a wide range of topics. The book begins with a series of reviews on the use of MEG for clinical applications, the study of cognitive functions in various diseases, and one chapter focusing specifically on studies of memory with MEG. There are sections with chapters that describe source localization issues, the use of beamformers and dipole source methods, as well as phase-based analyses, and a step-by-step guide to using dipoles for epilepsy spike analyses. The book ends with a section describing new innovations in MEG systems, namely an on-line real-time MEG data acquisition system, novel applications for MEG research, and a proposal for a helium re-circulation system. With such breadth of topics, there will be a chapter that is of interest to every MEG researcher or clinician