A Weakly Supervised learning technique for classifying facial expressions

• Published in: Pattern recognition letters Vol. 128; pp. 162 - 168
• Main Authors: Happy, S L, Dantcheva, Antitza, Bremond, Francois
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Amsterdam Elsevier B.V 01.12.2019; Elsevier Science Ltd; Elsevier
• Subjects: Artificial neural networks; Classification; Computer Science; Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition; Datasets; Emotions; Expression vectors; Facial expression recognition; Hypotheses; Label smoothing; Neural networks; Supervised learning; Weakly supervised learning; Facial expression recognition; Weakly supervised learning; 41A10; 65D05; 65D17; Label smoothing; 41A05
• ISSN: 0167-8655; 1872-7344
• DOI: 10.1016/j.patrec.2019.08.025

•A weakly supervised technique for facial expression recognition is proposed.•A CNN model is trained using both labelled and unlabelled samples simultaneously.•Iterative label smoothing with self training procedure is the key in this approach.•It can adapt to expression intensities even though it is trained with strict labels.•This achieves significant cross-database performance. The universal hypothesis suggests that the six basic emotions - anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise - are being expressed by similar facial expressions by all humans. While existing datasets support the universal hypothesis and comprise of images and videos with discrete disjoint labels of profound emotions, real-life data contains jointly occurring emotions and expressions of different intensities. Models, which are trained using categorical one-hot vectors often over-fit and fail to recognize low or moderate expression intensities. Motivated by the above, as well as by the lack of sufficient annotated data, we here propose a weakly supervised learning technique for expression classification, which leverages the information of unannotated data. Crucial in our approach is that we first train a convolutional neural network (CNN) with label smoothing in a supervised manner and proceed to tune the CNN-weights with both labelled and unlabelled data simultaneously. Experiments on four datasets demonstrate large performance gains in cross-database performance, as well as show that the proposed method achieves to learn different expression intensities, even when trained with categorical samples.