Classifying facial expressions into different categories requires capturing regional distortions of facial landmarks. We believe that second-order statistics such as covariance is better able to capture such distortions in regional facial features. In this work, we explore the benefits of using a manifold network structure for covariance pooling to improve facial expression recognition. In particular, we first employ such kind of manifold networks in conjunction with traditional convolutional networks for spatial pooling within individual image feature maps in an end-to-end deep learning manner. By doing so, we are able to achieve a recognition accuracy of 58.14% on the validation set of Static Facial Expressions in the Wild (SFEW 2.0) and 87.0% on the validation set of Real-World Affective Faces (RAF) Database 1 . Both of these results are the best results we are aware of. Besides, we leverage covariance pooling to capture the temporal evolution of per-frame features for video-based facial expression recognition. Our reported results demonstrate the advantage of pooling image-set features temporally by stacking the designed manifold network of covariance pooling on top of convolutional network layers.
In the context of facial expression recognition from images, Acharya et al. REF explored convolutional networks in conjunction with manifold networks for covariance pooling in an end-to-end deep learning manner.
Covariance Pooling for Facial Expression Recognition
2018 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (CVPRW)
2018 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (CVPRW)
Computer Science