English

Covariance Pooling For Facial Expression Recognition

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2018-05-15 v1

Abstract

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 fea- tures. In this work, we explore the benefits of using a man- ifold network structure for covariance pooling to improve facial expression recognition. In particular, we first employ such kind of manifold networks in conjunction with tradi- tional convolutional networks for spatial pooling within in- dividual 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 vali- dation set of Real-World Affective Faces (RAF) Database. Both of these results are the best results we are aware of. Besides, we leverage covariance pooling to capture the tem- poral 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 pool-ing on top of convolutional network layers.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1805.04855,
  title  = {Covariance Pooling For Facial Expression Recognition},
  author = {Dinesh Acharya and Zhiwu Huang and Danda Paudel and Luc Van Gool},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.04855},
  year   = {2018}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T01:53:13.266Z