Automatic Analysis of Facial Expressions Based on Deep Covariance Trajectories

In this paper, we propose a new approach for facial expression recognition using deep covariance descriptors. The solution is based on the idea of encoding local and global Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) features extracted from still images, in compact local and global covariance descriptors. The space geometry of the covariance matrices is that of Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) matrices. By conducting the classification of static facial expressions using Support Vector Machine (SVM) with a valid Gaussian kernel on the SPD manifold, we show that deep covariance descriptors are more effective than the standard classification with fully connected layers and softmax. Besides, we propose a completely new and original solution to model the temporal dynamic of facial expressions as deep trajectories on the SPD manifold. As an extension of the classification pipeline of covariance descriptors, we apply SVM with valid positive definite kernels derived from global alignment for deep covariance trajectories classification. By performing extensive experiments on the Oulu-CASIA, CK+, and SFEW datasets, we show that both the proposed static and dynamic approaches achieve state-of-the-art performance for facial expression recognition outperforming many recent approaches.Comment: A preliminary version of this work appeared in "Otberdout N, Kacem A, Daoudi M, Ballihi L, Berretti S. Deep Covariance Descriptors for Facial Expression Recognition, in British Machine Vision Conference 2018, BMVC 2018, Northumbria University, Newcastle, UK, September 3-6, 2018. ; 2018 :159." arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1805.0386

End-to-end 3D face reconstruction with deep neural networks

Monocular 3D facial shape reconstruction from a single 2D facial image has been an active research area due to its wide applications. Inspired by the success of deep neural networks (DNN), we propose a DNN-based approach for End-to-End 3D FAce Reconstruction (UH-E2FAR) from a single 2D image. Different from recent works that reconstruct and refine the 3D face in an iterative manner using both an RGB image and an initial 3D facial shape rendering, our DNN model is end-to-end, and thus the complicated 3D rendering process can be avoided. Moreover, we integrate in the DNN architecture two components, namely a multi-task loss function and a fusion convolutional neural network (CNN) to improve facial expression reconstruction. With the multi-task loss function, 3D face reconstruction is divided into neutral 3D facial shape reconstruction and expressive 3D facial shape reconstruction. The neutral 3D facial shape is class-specific. Therefore, higher layer features are useful. In comparison, the expressive 3D facial shape favors lower or intermediate layer features. With the fusion-CNN, features from different intermediate layers are fused and transformed for predicting the 3D expressive facial shape. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the superiority of our end-to-end framework in improving the accuracy of 3D face reconstruction.Comment: Accepted to CVPR1