Machine learning for automatic analysis of affective behaviour

The automated analysis of affect has been gaining rapidly increasing attention by researchers over the past two decades, as it constitutes a fundamental step towards achieving next-generation computing technologies and integrating them into everyday life (e.g. via affect-aware, user-adaptive interfaces, medical imaging, health assessment, ambient intelligence etc.). The work presented in this thesis focuses on several fundamental problems manifesting in the course towards the achievement of reliable, accurate and robust affect sensing systems. In more detail, the motivation behind this work lies in recent developments in the field, namely (i) the creation of large, audiovisual databases for affect analysis in the so-called ''Big-Data`` era, along with (ii) the need to deploy systems under demanding, real-world conditions. These developments led to the requirement for the analysis of emotion expressions continuously in time, instead of merely processing static images, thus unveiling the wide range of temporal dynamics related to human behaviour to researchers. The latter entails another deviation from the traditional line of research in the field: instead of focusing on predicting posed, discrete basic emotions (happiness, surprise etc.), it became necessary to focus on spontaneous, naturalistic expressions captured under settings more proximal to real-world conditions, utilising more expressive emotion descriptions than a set of discrete labels. To this end, the main motivation of this thesis is to deal with challenges arising from the adoption of continuous dimensional emotion descriptions under naturalistic scenarios, considered to capture a much wider spectrum of expressive variability than basic emotions, and most importantly model emotional states which are commonly expressed by humans in their everyday life. In the first part of this thesis, we attempt to demystify the quite unexplored problem of predicting continuous emotional dimensions. This work is amongst the first to explore the problem of predicting emotion dimensions via multi-modal fusion, utilising facial expressions, auditory cues and shoulder gestures. A major contribution of the work presented in this thesis lies in proposing the utilisation of various relationships exhibited by emotion dimensions in order to improve the prediction accuracy of machine learning methods - an idea which has been taken on by other researchers in the field since. In order to experimentally evaluate this, we extend methods such as the Long Short-Term Memory Neural Networks (LSTM), the Relevance Vector Machine (RVM) and Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) in order to exploit output relationships in learning. As it is shown, this increases the accuracy of machine learning models applied to this task. The annotation of continuous dimensional emotions is a tedious task, highly prone to the influence of various types of noise. Performed real-time by several annotators (usually experts), the annotation process can be heavily biased by factors such as subjective interpretations of the emotional states observed, the inherent ambiguity of labels related to human behaviour, the varying reaction lags exhibited by each annotator as well as other factors such as input device noise and annotation errors. In effect, the annotations manifest a strong spatio-temporal annotator-specific bias. Failing to properly deal with annotation bias and noise leads to an inaccurate ground truth, and therefore to ill-generalisable machine learning models. This deems the proper fusion of multiple annotations, and the inference of a clean, corrected version of the ``ground truth'' as one of the most significant challenges in the area. A highly important contribution of this thesis lies in the introduction of Dynamic Probabilistic Canonical Correlation Analysis (DPCCA), a method aimed at fusing noisy continuous annotations. By adopting a private-shared space model, we isolate the individual characteristics that are annotator-specific and not shared, while most importantly we model the common, underlying annotation which is shared by annotators (i.e., the derived ground truth). By further learning temporal dynamics and incorporating a time-warping process, we are able to derive a clean version of the ground truth given multiple annotations, eliminating temporal discrepancies and other nuisances. The integration of the temporal alignment process within the proposed private-shared space model deems DPCCA suitable for the problem of temporally aligning human behaviour; that is, given temporally unsynchronised sequences (e.g., videos of two persons smiling), the goal is to generate the temporally synchronised sequences (e.g., the smile apex should co-occur in the videos). Temporal alignment is an important problem for many applications where multiple datasets need to be aligned in time. Furthermore, it is particularly suitable for the analysis of facial expressions, where the activation of facial muscles (Action Units) typically follows a set of predefined temporal phases. A highly challenging scenario is when the observations are perturbed by gross, non-Gaussian noise (e.g., occlusions), as is often the case when analysing data acquired under real-world conditions. To account for non-Gaussian noise, a robust variant of Canonical Correlation Analysis (RCCA) for robust fusion and temporal alignment is proposed. The model captures the shared, low-rank subspace of the observations, isolating the gross noise in a sparse noise term. RCCA is amongst the first robust variants of CCA proposed in literature, and as we show in related experiments outperforms other, state-of-the-art methods for related tasks such as the fusion of multiple modalities under gross noise. Beyond private-shared space models, Component Analysis (CA) is an integral component of most computer vision systems, particularly in terms of reducing the usually high-dimensional input spaces in a meaningful manner pertaining to the task-at-hand (e.g., prediction, clustering). A final, significant contribution of this thesis lies in proposing the first unifying framework for probabilistic component analysis. The proposed framework covers most well-known CA methods, such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), Locality Preserving Projections (LPP) and Slow Feature Analysis (SFA), providing further theoretical insights into the workings of CA. Moreover, the proposed framework is highly flexible, enabling novel CA methods to be generated by simply manipulating the connectivity of latent variables (i.e. the latent neighbourhood). As shown experimentally, methods derived via the proposed framework outperform other equivalents in several problems related to affect sensing and facial expression analysis, while providing advantages such as reduced complexity and explicit variance modelling.Open Acces

Kernelized Supervised Dictionary Learning

The representation of a signal using a learned dictionary instead of predefined operators, such as wavelets, has led to state-of-the-art results in various applications such as denoising, texture analysis, and face recognition. The area of dictionary learning is closely associated with sparse representation, which means that the signal is represented using few atoms in the dictionary. Despite recent advances in the computation of a dictionary using fast algorithms such as K-SVD, online learning, and cyclic coordinate descent, which make the computation of a dictionary from millions of data samples computationally feasible, the dictionary is mainly computed using unsupervised approaches such as k-means. These approaches learn the dictionary by minimizing the reconstruction error without taking into account the category information, which is not optimal in classification tasks. In this thesis, we propose a supervised dictionary learning (SDL) approach by incorporating information on class labels into the learning of the dictionary. To this end, we propose to learn the dictionary in a space where the dependency between the signals and their corresponding labels is maximized. To maximize this dependency, the recently-introduced Hilbert Schmidt independence criterion (HSIC) is used. The learned dictionary is compact and has closed form; the proposed approach is fast. We show that it outperforms other unsupervised and supervised dictionary learning approaches in the literature on real-world data. Moreover, the proposed SDL approach has as its main advantage that it can be easily kernelized, particularly by incorporating a data-driven kernel such as a compression-based kernel, into the formulation. In this thesis, we propose a novel compression-based (dis)similarity measure. The proposed measure utilizes a 2D MPEG-1 encoder, which takes into consideration the spatial locality and connectivity of pixels in the images. The proposed formulation has been carefully designed based on MPEG encoder functionality. To this end, by design, it solely uses P-frame coding to find the (dis)similarity among patches/images. We show that the proposed measure works properly on both small and large patch sizes on textures. Experimental results show that by incorporating the proposed measure as a kernel into our SDL, it significantly improves the performance of a supervised pixel-based texture classification on Brodatz and outdoor images compared to other compression-based dissimilarity measures, as well as state-of-the-art SDL methods. It also improves the computation speed by about 40% compared to its closest rival. Eventually, we have extended the proposed SDL to multiview learning, where more than one representation is available on a dataset. We propose two different multiview approaches: one fusing the feature sets in the original space and then learning the dictionary and sparse coefficients on the fused set; and the other by learning one dictionary and the corresponding coefficients in each view separately, and then fusing the representations in the space of the dictionaries learned. We will show that the proposed multiview approaches benefit from the complementary information in multiple views, and investigate the relative performance of these approaches in the application of emotion recognition

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

Machine Learning

Machine Learning can be defined in various ways related to a scientific domain concerned with the design and development of theoretical and implementation tools that allow building systems with some Human Like intelligent behavior. Machine learning addresses more specifically the ability to improve automatically through experience

Artificial Intelligence Tools for Facial Expression Analysis.

Inner emotions show visibly upon the human face and are understood as a basic guide to an individual’s inner world. It is, therefore, possible to determine a person’s attitudes and the effects of others’ behaviour on their deeper feelings through examining facial expressions. In real world applications, machines that interact with people need strong facial expression recognition. This recognition is seen to hold advantages for varied applications in affective computing, advanced human-computer interaction, security, stress and depression analysis, robotic systems, and machine learning. This thesis starts by proposing a benchmark of dynamic versus static methods for facial Action Unit (AU) detection. AU activation is a set of local individual facial muscle parts that occur in unison constituting a natural facial expression event. Detecting AUs automatically can provide explicit benefits since it considers both static and dynamic facial features. For this research, AU occurrence activation detection was conducted by extracting features (static and dynamic) of both nominal hand-crafted and deep learning representation from each static image of a video. This confirmed the superior ability of a pretrained model that leaps in performance. Next, temporal modelling was investigated to detect the underlying temporal variation phases using supervised and unsupervised methods from dynamic sequences. During these processes, the importance of stacking dynamic on top of static was discovered in encoding deep features for learning temporal information when combining the spatial and temporal schemes simultaneously. Also, this study found that fusing both temporal and temporal features will give more long term temporal pattern information. Moreover, we hypothesised that using an unsupervised method would enable the leaching of invariant information from dynamic textures. Recently, fresh cutting-edge developments have been created by approaches based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). In the second section of this thesis, we propose a model based on the adoption of an unsupervised DCGAN for the facial features’ extraction and classification to achieve the following: the creation of facial expression images under different arbitrary poses (frontal, multi-view, and in the wild), and the recognition of emotion categories and AUs, in an attempt to resolve the problem of recognising the static seven classes of emotion in the wild. Thorough experimentation with the proposed cross-database performance demonstrates that this approach can improve the generalization results. Additionally, we showed that the features learnt by the DCGAN process are poorly suited to encoding facial expressions when observed under multiple views, or when trained from a limited number of positive examples. Finally, this research focuses on disentangling identity from expression for facial expression recognition. A novel technique was implemented for emotion recognition from a single monocular image. A large-scale dataset (Face vid) was created from facial image videos which were rich in variations and distribution of facial dynamics, appearance, identities, expressions, and 3D poses. This dataset was used to train a DCNN (ResNet) to regress the expression parameters from a 3D Morphable Model jointly with a back-end classifier

Affective Speech Recognition

Speech, as a medium of interaction, carries two different streams of information. Whereas one stream carries explicit messages, the other one contains implicit information about speakers themselves. Affective speech recognition is a set of theories and tools that intend to automate unfolding the part of the implicit stream that has to do with humans emotion. Application of affective speech recognition is to human computer interaction; a machine that is able to recognize humans emotion could engage the user in a more effective interaction. This thesis proposes a set of analyses and methodologies that advance automatic recognition of affect from speech. The proposed solution spans two dimensions of the problem: speech signal processing, and statistical learning. At the speech signal processing dimension, extraction of speech low-level descriptors is dis- cussed, and a set of descriptors that exploit the spectrum of the signal are proposed, which have shown to be particularly practical for capturing affective qualities of speech. Moreover, consider- ing the non-stationary property of the speech signal, further proposed is a measure of dynamicity that captures that property of speech by quantifying changes of the signal over time. Furthermore, based on the proposed set of low-level descriptors, it is shown that individual human beings are different in conveying emotions, and that parts of the spectrum that hold the affective information are different from one person to another. Therefore, the concept of emotion profile is proposed that formalizes those differences by taking into account different factors such as cultural and gender-specific differences, as well as those distinctions that have to do with individual human beings. At the statistical learning dimension, variable selection is performed to identify speech features that are most imperative to extracting affective information. In doing so, low-level descriptors are distinguished from statistical functionals, therefore, effectiveness of each of the two are studied dependently and independently. The major importance of variable selection as a standalone component of a solution is to real-time application of affective speech recognition. Although thousands of speech features are commonly used to tackle this problem in theory, extracting that many features in a real-time manner is unrealistic, especially for mobile applications. Results of the conducted investigations show that the required number of speech features is far less than the number that is commonly used in the literature of the problem. At the core of an affective speech recognition solution is a statistical model that uses speech features to recognize emotions. Such a model comes with a set of parameters that are estimated through a learning process. Proposed in this thesis is a learning algorithm, developed based on the notion of Hilbert-Schmidt independence criterion and named max-dependence regression, that maximizes the dependence between predicted and actual values of affective qualities. Pearson’s correlation coefficient is commonly used as the measure of goodness of a fit in the literature of affective computing, therefore max-dependence regression is proposed to make the learning and hypothesis testing criteria consistent with one another. Results of this research show that doing so results in higher prediction accuracy. Lastly, sparse representation for affective speech datasets is considered in this thesis. For this purpose, the application of a dictionary learning algorithm based on Hilbert-Schmidt independence criterion is proposed. Dictionary learning is used to identify the most important bases of the data in order to improve the generalization capability of the proposed solution to affective speech recognition. Based on the dictionary learning approach of choice, fusion of feature vectors is proposed. It is shown that sparse representation leads to higher generalization capability for affective speech recognition

High-Performance Modelling and Simulation for Big Data Applications

This open access book was prepared as a Final Publication of the COST Action IC1406 “High-Performance Modelling and Simulation for Big Data Applications (cHiPSet)“ project. Long considered important pillars of the scientific method, Modelling and Simulation have evolved from traditional discrete numerical methods to complex data-intensive continuous analytical optimisations. Resolution, scale, and accuracy have become essential to predict and analyse natural and complex systems in science and engineering. When their level of abstraction raises to have a better discernment of the domain at hand, their representation gets increasingly demanding for computational and data resources. On the other hand, High Performance Computing typically entails the effective use of parallel and distributed processing units coupled with efficient storage, communication and visualisation systems to underpin complex data-intensive applications in distinct scientific and technical domains. It is then arguably required to have a seamless interaction of High Performance Computing with Modelling and Simulation in order to store, compute, analyse, and visualise large data sets in science and engineering. Funded by the European Commission, cHiPSet has provided a dynamic trans-European forum for their members and distinguished guests to openly discuss novel perspectives and topics of interests for these two communities. This cHiPSet compendium presents a set of selected case studies related to healthcare, biological data, computational advertising, multimedia, finance, bioinformatics, and telecommunications