3,183 research outputs found
DeepCoder: Semi-parametric Variational Autoencoders for Automatic Facial Action Coding
Human face exhibits an inherent hierarchy in its representations (i.e.,
holistic facial expressions can be encoded via a set of facial action units
(AUs) and their intensity). Variational (deep) auto-encoders (VAE) have shown
great results in unsupervised extraction of hierarchical latent representations
from large amounts of image data, while being robust to noise and other
undesired artifacts. Potentially, this makes VAEs a suitable approach for
learning facial features for AU intensity estimation. Yet, most existing
VAE-based methods apply classifiers learned separately from the encoded
features. By contrast, the non-parametric (probabilistic) approaches, such as
Gaussian Processes (GPs), typically outperform their parametric counterparts,
but cannot deal easily with large amounts of data. To this end, we propose a
novel VAE semi-parametric modeling framework, named DeepCoder, which combines
the modeling power of parametric (convolutional) and nonparametric (ordinal
GPs) VAEs, for joint learning of (1) latent representations at multiple levels
in a task hierarchy1, and (2) classification of multiple ordinal outputs. We
show on benchmark datasets for AU intensity estimation that the proposed
DeepCoder outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches, and related VAEs and
deep learning models.Comment: ICCV 2017 - accepte
Self-supervised Facial Action Unit Detection with Region and Relation Learning
Facial action unit (AU) detection is a challenging task due to the scarcity
of manual annotations. Recent works on AU detection with self-supervised
learning have emerged to address this problem, aiming to learn meaningful AU
representations from numerous unlabeled data. However, most existing AU
detection works with self-supervised learning utilize global facial features
only, while AU-related properties such as locality and relevance are not fully
explored. In this paper, we propose a novel self-supervised framework for AU
detection with the region and relation learning. In particular, AU related
attention map is utilized to guide the model to focus more on AU-specific
regions to enhance the integrity of AU local features. Meanwhile, an improved
Optimal Transport (OT) algorithm is introduced to exploit the correlation
characteristics among AUs. In addition, Swin Transformer is exploited to model
the long-distance dependencies within each AU region during feature learning.
The evaluation results on BP4D and DISFA demonstrate that our proposed method
is comparable or even superior to the state-of-the-art self-supervised learning
methods and supervised AU detection methods.Comment: Accepted by ICASSP 202
Dynamics are Important for the Recognition of Equine Pain in Video
A prerequisite to successfully alleviate pain in animals is to recognize it,
which is a great challenge in non-verbal species. Furthermore, prey animals
such as horses tend to hide their pain. In this study, we propose a deep
recurrent two-stream architecture for the task of distinguishing pain from
non-pain in videos of horses. Different models are evaluated on a unique
dataset showing horses under controlled trials with moderate pain induction,
which has been presented in earlier work. Sequential models are experimentally
compared to single-frame models, showing the importance of the temporal
dimension of the data, and are benchmarked against a veterinary expert
classification of the data. We additionally perform baseline comparisons with
generalized versions of state-of-the-art human pain recognition methods. While
equine pain detection in machine learning is a novel field, our results surpass
veterinary expert performance and outperform pain detection results reported
for other larger non-human species.Comment: CVPR 2019: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognitio
Time-delay neural network for continuous emotional dimension prediction from facial expression sequences
"(c) 2015 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, 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 components of this work in other works."Automatic continuous affective state prediction from naturalistic facial expression is a very challenging research topic but very important in human-computer interaction. One of the main challenges is modeling the dynamics that characterize naturalistic expressions. In this paper, a novel two-stage automatic system is proposed to continuously predict affective dimension values from facial expression videos. In the first stage, traditional regression methods are used to classify each individual video frame, while in the second stage, a Time-Delay Neural Network (TDNN) is proposed to model the temporal relationships between
consecutive predictions. The two-stage approach separates the emotional state dynamics modeling from an individual emotional state prediction step based on input features. In doing so, the temporal information used by the TDNN is not biased by the high variability between features of consecutive frames and allows the network to more easily exploit the slow changing dynamics between emotional states. The system was fully tested and evaluated on three different facial expression video datasets. Our experimental results demonstrate that the use of a two-stage approach combined with the TDNN to take into account previously classified frames significantly improves the overall performance of continuous emotional state estimation in naturalistic
facial expressions. The proposed approach has won the affect recognition sub-challenge of the third international Audio/Visual Emotion Recognition Challenge (AVEC2013)1
An original framework for understanding human actions and body language by using deep neural networks
The evolution of both fields of Computer Vision (CV) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) has allowed the development of efficient automatic systems for the analysis of people's behaviour.
By studying hand movements it is possible to recognize gestures, often used by people to communicate information in a non-verbal way.
These gestures can also be used to control or interact with devices without physically touching them. In particular, sign language and semaphoric hand gestures are the two foremost areas of interest due to their importance in Human-Human Communication (HHC) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), respectively.
While the processing of body movements play a key role in the action recognition and affective computing fields. The former is essential to understand how people act in an environment, while the latter tries to interpret people's emotions based on their poses and movements;
both are essential tasks in many computer vision applications, including event recognition, and video surveillance.
In this Ph.D. thesis, an original framework for understanding Actions and body language is presented. The framework is composed of three main modules: in the first one, a Long Short Term Memory Recurrent Neural Networks (LSTM-RNNs) based method for the Recognition of Sign Language and Semaphoric Hand Gestures is proposed; the second module presents a solution based on 2D skeleton and two-branch stacked LSTM-RNNs for action recognition in video sequences; finally, in the last module, a solution for basic non-acted emotion recognition by using 3D skeleton and Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) is provided.
The performances of RNN-LSTMs are explored in depth, due to their ability to model the long term contextual information of temporal sequences, making them suitable for analysing body movements.
All the modules were tested by using challenging datasets, well known in the state of the art, showing remarkable results compared to the current literature methods
ModDrop: adaptive multi-modal gesture recognition
We present a method for gesture detection and localisation based on
multi-scale and multi-modal deep learning. Each visual modality captures
spatial information at a particular spatial scale (such as motion of the upper
body or a hand), and the whole system operates at three temporal scales. Key to
our technique is a training strategy which exploits: i) careful initialization
of individual modalities; and ii) gradual fusion involving random dropping of
separate channels (dubbed ModDrop) for learning cross-modality correlations
while preserving uniqueness of each modality-specific representation. We
present experiments on the ChaLearn 2014 Looking at People Challenge gesture
recognition track, in which we placed first out of 17 teams. Fusing multiple
modalities at several spatial and temporal scales leads to a significant
increase in recognition rates, allowing the model to compensate for errors of
the individual classifiers as well as noise in the separate channels.
Futhermore, the proposed ModDrop training technique ensures robustness of the
classifier to missing signals in one or several channels to produce meaningful
predictions from any number of available modalities. In addition, we
demonstrate the applicability of the proposed fusion scheme to modalities of
arbitrary nature by experiments on the same dataset augmented with audio.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figure
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