A Multi-Task Learning & Generation Framework: Valence-Arousal, Action Units & Primary Expressions

Abstract

Over the past few years many research efforts have been devoted to the field of affect analysis. Various approaches have been proposed for: i) discrete emotion recognition in terms of the primary facial expressions; ii) emotion analysis in terms of facial Action Units (AUs), assuming a fixed expression intensity; iii) dimensional emotion analysis, in terms of valence and arousal (VA). These approaches can only be effective, if they are developed using large, appropriately annotated databases, showing behaviors of people in-the-wild, i.e., in uncontrolled environments. Aff-Wild has been the first, large-scale, in-the-wild database (including around 1,200,000 frames of 300 videos), annotated in terms of VA. In the vast majority of existing emotion databases, their annotation is limited to either primary expressions, or valence-arousal, or action units. In this paper, we first annotate a part (around $234,000$ frames) of the Aff-Wild database in terms of $8$ AUs and another part (around $288,000$ frames) in terms of the $7$ basic emotion categories, so that parts of this database are annotated in terms of VA, as well as AUs, or primary expressions. Then, we set up and tackle multi-task learning for emotion recognition, as well as for facial image generation. Multi-task learning is performed using: i) a deep neural network with shared hidden layers, which learns emotional attributes by exploiting their inter-dependencies; ii) a discriminator of a generative adversarial network (GAN). On the other hand, image generation is implemented through the generator of the GAN. For these two tasks, we carefully design loss functions that fit the examined set-up. Experiments are presented which illustrate the good performance of the proposed approach when applied to the new annotated parts of the Aff-Wild database.