No Arabic abstract
We describe a deep learning based method for estimating 3D facial expression coefficients. Unlike previous work, our process does not relay on facial landmark detection methods as a proxy step. Recent methods have shown that a CNN can be trained to regress accurate and discriminative 3D morphable model (3DMM) representations, directly from image intensities. By foregoing facial landmark detection, these methods were able to estimate shapes for occluded faces appearing in unprecedented in-the-wild viewing conditions. We build on those methods by showing that facial expressions can also be estimated by a robust, deep, landmark-free approach. Our ExpNet CNN is applied directly to the intensities of a face image and regresses a 29D vector of 3D expression coefficients. We propose a unique method for collecting data to train this network, leveraging on the robustness of deep networks to training label noise. We further offer a novel means of evaluating the accuracy of estimated expression coefficients: by measuring how well they capture facial emotions on the CK+ and EmotiW-17 emotion recognition benchmarks. We show that our ExpNet produces expression coefficients which better discriminate between facial emotions than those obtained using state of the art, facial landmark detection techniques. Moreover, this advantage grows as image scales drop, demonstrating that our ExpNet is more robust to scale changes than landmark detection methods. Finally, at the same level of accuracy, our ExpNet is orders of magnitude faster than its alternatives.
While deep learning-based 3D face generation has made a progress recently, the problem of dynamic 3D (4D) facial expression synthesis is less investigated. In this paper, we propose a novel solution to the following question: given one input 3D neutral face, can we generate dynamic 3D (4D) facial expressions from it? To tackle this problem, we first propose a mesh encoder-decoder architecture (Expr-ED) that exploits a set of 3D landmarks to generate an expressive 3D face from its neutral counterpart. Then, we extend it to 4D by modeling the temporal dynamics of facial expressions using a manifold-valued GAN capable of generating a sequence of 3D landmarks from an expression label (Motion3DGAN). The generated landmarks are fed into the mesh encoder-decoder, ultimately producing a sequence of 3D expressive faces. By decoupling the two steps, we separately address the non-linearity induced by the mesh deformation and motion dynamics. The experimental results on the CoMA dataset show that our mesh encoder-decoder guided by landmarks brings a significant improvement with respect to other landmark-based 3D fitting approaches, and that we can generate high quality dynamic facial expressions. This framework further enables the 3D expression intensity to be continuously adapted from low to high intensity. Finally, we show our framework can be applied to other tasks, such as 2D-3D facial expression transfer.
With more than 300 million people depressed worldwide, depression is a global problem. Due to access barriers such as social stigma, cost, and treatment availability, 60% of mentally-ill adults do not receive any mental health services. Effective and efficient diagnosis relies on detecting clinical symptoms of depression. Automatic detection of depressive symptoms would potentially improve diagnostic accuracy and availability, leading to faster intervention. In this work, we present a machine learning method for measuring the severity of depressive symptoms. Our multi-modal method uses 3D facial expressions and spoken language, commonly available from modern cell phones. It demonstrates an average error of 3.67 points (15.3% relative) on the clinically-validated Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ) scale. For detecting major depressive disorder, our model demonstrates 83.3% sensitivity and 82.6% specificity. Overall, this paper shows how speech recognition, computer vision, and natural language processing can be combined to assist mental health patients and practitioners. This technology could be deployed to cell phones worldwide and facilitate low-cost universal access to mental health care.
In this paper, we propose a new approach for facial expression recognition using deep covariance descriptors. The solution is based on the idea of encoding local and global Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) features extracted from still images, in compact local and global covariance descriptors. The space geometry of the covariance matrices is that of Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) matrices. By conducting the classification of static facial expressions using Support Vector Machine (SVM) with a valid Gaussian kernel on the SPD manifold, we show that deep covariance descriptors are more effective than the standard classification with fully connected layers and softmax. Besides, we propose a completely new and original solution to model the temporal dynamic of facial expressions as deep trajectories on the SPD manifold. As an extension of the classification pipeline of covariance descriptors, we apply SVM with valid positive definite kernels derived from global alignment for deep covariance trajectories classification. By performing extensive experiments on the Oulu-CASIA, CK+, and SFEW datasets, we show that both the proposed static and dynamic approaches achieve state-of-the-art performance for facial expression recognition outperforming many recent approaches.
Recently, heatmap regression has been widely explored in facial landmark detection and obtained remarkable performance. However, most of the existing heatmap regression-based facial landmark detection methods neglect to explore the high-order feature correlations, which is very important to learn more representative features and enhance shape constraints. Moreover, no explicit global shape constraints have been added to the final predicted landmarks, which leads to a reduction in accuracy. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a Multi-order Multi-constraint Deep Network (MMDN) for more powerful feature correlations and shape constraints learning. Specifically, an Implicit Multi-order Correlating Geometry-aware (IMCG) model is proposed to introduce the multi-order spatial correlations and multi-order channel correlations for more discriminative representations. Furthermore, an Explicit Probability-based Boundary-adaptive Regression (EPBR) method is developed to enhance the global shape constraints and further search the semantically consistent landmarks in the predicted boundary for robust facial landmark detection. Its interesting to show that the proposed MMDN can generate more accurate boundary-adaptive landmark heatmaps and effectively enhance shape constraints to the predicted landmarks for faces with large pose variations and heavy occlusions. Experimental results on challenging benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our MMDN over state-of-the-art facial landmark detection methods. The code has been publicly available at https://github.com/junwan2014/MMDN-master.
Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs)-based facial landmark detection methods have achieved great success. However, most of existing CNN-based facial landmark detection methods have not attempted to activate multiple correlated facial parts and learn different semantic features from them that they can not accurately model the relationships among the local details and can not fully explore more discriminative and fine semantic features, thus they suffer from partial occlusions and large pose variations. To address these problems, we propose a cross-order cross-semantic deep network (CCDN) to boost the semantic features learning for robust facial landmark detection. Specifically, a cross-order two-squeeze multi-excitation (CTM) module is proposed to introduce the cross-order channel correlations for more discriminative representations learning and multiple attention-specific part activation. Moreover, a novel cross-order cross-semantic (COCS) regularizer is designed to drive the network to learn cross-order cross-semantic features from different activation for facial landmark detection. It is interesting to show that by integrating the CTM module and COCS regularizer, the proposed CCDN can effectively activate and learn more fine and complementary cross-order cross-semantic features to improve the accuracy of facial landmark detection under extremely challenging scenarios. Experimental results on challenging benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our CCDN over state-of-the-art facial landmark detection methods.