Automated emotion recognition in the wild from facial images remains a challenging problem. Although recent advances in Deep Learning have supposed a significant breakthrough in this topic, strong changes in pose, orientation and point of view severely harm current approaches. In addition, the acquisition of labeled datasets is costly, and current state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms cannot model all the aforementioned difficulties. In this paper, we propose to apply a multi-task learning loss function to share a common feature representation with other related tasks. Particularly we show that emotion recognition benefits from jointly learning a model with a detector of facial Action Units (collective muscle movements). The proposed loss function addresses the problem of learning multiple tasks with heterogeneously labeled data, improving previous multi-task approaches. We validate the proposal using two datasets acquired in non controlled environments, and an application to predict compound facial emotion expressions.
@article{arxiv.1802.06664,
title = {Multi-task, multi-label and multi-domain learning with residual convolutional networks for emotion recognition},
author = {Gerard Pons and David Masip},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.06664},
year = {2018}
}