Proceedings - 12th IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition, FG 2017 - 1st International Workshop on Adaptive Shot Learning for Gesture Understanding and Production, ASL4GUP 2017, Biometrics in the Wild, Bwild 2017, Heterogeneous Face Recognition, HFR 2017, Joint Challenge on Dominant and Complementary Emotion Recognition Using Micro Emotion Features and Head-Pose Estimation, DCER and HPE 2017 and 3rd Facial Expression Recognition and Analysis Challenge, FERA 2017
Doi
Abstract
Assessing pain levels in animals is a crucial, but time-consuming process in maintaining their welfare. Facial expressions in sheep are an efficient and reliable indicator of pain levels. In this paper, we have extended techniques for recognising human facial expressions to encompass facial action units in sheep, which can then facilitate automatic estimation of pain levels. Our multi-level approach starts with detection of sheep faces, localisation of facial landmarks, normalisation and then extraction of facial features. These are described using Histogram of Oriented Gradients, and then classified using Support Vector Machines. Our experiments show an overall accuracy of 67% on sheep Action Units classification. We argue that with more data, our approach on automated pain level assessment can be generalised to other animals
