Deep convolution network based emotion analysis towards mental health care

PurposeFacial expression provides abundant information for social interaction, and the analysis and utilization of facial expression data are playing a huge driving role in all areas of society. Facial expression data can reflect people's mental state. In health care, the analysis and processing of facial expression data can promote the improvement of people's health. This paper introduces several important public facial expression databases and describes the process of facial expression recognition. The standard facial expression database FER2013 and CK+ were used as the main training samples. At the same time, the facial expression image data of 16 Chinese children were collected as supplementary samples. With the help of VGG19 and Resnet18 algorithm models of deep convolution neural network, this paper studies and develops an information system for the diagnosis of autism by facial expression data.Design/methodology/approachThe facial expression data of the training samples are based on the standard expression database FER2013 and CK+. FER2013 and CK+ databases are a common facial expression data set, which is suitable for the research of facial expression recognition. On the basis of FER2013 and CK+ facial expression database, this paper uses the machine learning model support vector machine (SVM) and deep convolution neural network model CNN, VGG19 and Resnet18 to complete the facial expression recognition.FindingsIn this study, ten normal children and ten autistic patients were recruited to test the accuracy of the information system and the diagnostic effect of autism. After testing, the accuracy rate of facial expression recognition is 81.4 percent. This information system can easily identify autistic children. The feasibility of recognizing autism through facial expression is verified.Research limitations/implicationsThe CK+ facial expression database contains some adult facial expression images. In order to improve the accuracy of facial expression recognition for children, more facial expression data of children will be collected as training samples. Therefore, the recognition rate of the information system will be further improved.Originality/valueThis research uses facial expression data and the latest artificial intelligence technology, which is advanced in technology. The diagnostic accuracy of autism is higher than that of traditional systems, so this study is innovative. Research topics come from the actual needs of doctors, and the contents and methods of research have been discussed with doctors many times. The system can diagnose autism as early as possible, promote the early treatment and rehabilitation of patients, and then reduce the economic and mental burden of patients. Therefore, this information system has good social benefits and application value.

Most automatic facial expression analysis (AFEA) systems attempt to recognize facial expressions from data collected in a highly controlled environment with very high resolution frontal faces ( face regions greater than 200 x 200 pixels). However, in real environments, the face image is often in lower resolution and with head motion. It is unclear that the performance of AFEA systems for low resolution face images. The general approach to AFEA consists of 3 steps: face acquisition, facial feature extraction, and facial expression recognition. This paper explores the effects of different image resolutions for each step of facial expression analysis. The different approaches are compared for face detection, face data extraction and expression recognition. A total of five different resolutions of the head region are studied (288x384, 144x192, 72x96, 36x48, and 18Xx24) based on a widely used public database. The lower resolution images are down-sampled from the originals.

The recognition of facial expressions of emotion is adaptive for human social interaction, but the ability to do this and the manner in which it is achieved differs among individuals. Previous functional neuroimaging studies have demonstrated that some brain regions, such as the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), are active during the response to emotional facial expressions in healthy participants, and lesion studies have demonstrated that damage to these structures impairs the recognition of facial expressions. However, it remains to be established whether individual differences in the structure of these regions could be associated with differences in the ability to recognize facial expressions. We investigated this issue using acquired structural magnetic resonance imaging, and assessed the performance of healthy adults with respect to recognition of the facial expressions of six basic emotions. The gray matter volume of the right IFG positively correlated with the total accuracy of facial expression recognition. This suggests that individual differences in the ability to recognize facial expressions are associated with differences in the structure of the right IFG. Furthermore, the mirror neuron activity of the IFG may be important for establishing efficient facial mimicry to facilitate emotion recognition.

Cognitive domains related to attention and executive functions (a set of cognitive processes that regulate, control, and manage other cognitive abilities) seem to influence the recognition of facial expressions in people with Alzheimer's disease (AD). We examined the relationship between facial expression recognition, global cognition and executive function in people with AD according to their cognitive level. In a cross-sectional design, we included 130 participants with AD divided into three groups based on their Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) scores: MMSE 1 (scores 23-28), MMSE 2 (scores 17-22), and MMSE 3 (scores 11-16). Facial expression recognition ability was analyzed using the Faces Test. Executive function was analyzed using the Trail Making Test (TMT), the Verbal Fluency Test (VFT), the Semantic Fluency Test (SFT), the Digit Span Forward (DSF) and Backward (DSB) tests, and the Clock Drawing Test (CDT). In MMSE 1 group difficulties in divided attention and cognitive flexibility impacted the accuracy of facial expression recognition. In the MMSE 2 group, facial expression recognition was related to impairment in working memory. In the MMSE 3 group, the impact on facial expression recognition was directly related to visuoconstructive abilities. We observed that the executive resources involved in each evaluated group differed in terms of facial recognition task performance efficacy. Interventions at stimulating executive and visuoconstructive abilities in people with AD may contribute to better preservation of facial expression recognition.

Facial expression recognition (FER) is an important means for machines to perceive human emotions and interact with human beings. Most of the existing facial expression recognition methods only use a single convolutional neural network to extract the global features of the face. Some insignificant details and features with low frequency are easy to be ignored, and part of the facial features are lost. This paper proposes a facial expression recognition method based on multi branch structure, which extracts the global and detailed features of the face from the global and local aspects respectively, so as to make a more detailed representation of the facial expression and further improve the accuracy of facial expression recognition. Specifically, we first design a multi branch network, which takes Resnet-50 as the backbone network. The network structure after Conv Block3 is divided into three branches. The first branch is used to extract the global features of the face, and the second and third branches are used to cut the face into two parts and three parts after Conv Block5 to extract the detailed features of the face. Finally, the global features and detail features are fused in the full connection layer and input into the classifier for classification. The experimental results show that the accuracy of this method is 73.7%, which is 4% higher than that of traditional Resnet-50, which fully verifies the effectiveness of this method.

Automatic facial expression recognition is an emerging field. Moreover, the interest has been increased with the transition from laboratory-controlled conditions to in the wild scenarios. Most of the research has been done over nonoccluded faces under the constrained environment, while automatic facial expression is less understood/implemented for partial occlusion in the real world conditions. Apart from that, our research aims to tackle the issues of overfitting (caused by the shortage of adequate training data) and to alleviate the expression-unrelated/intraclass/nonlinear facial variations, such as head pose estimation, eye gaze estimation, intensity and microexpressions. In our research, we control the magnitude of each Action Unit (AU) and combine several of the Action Unit combinations to leverage learning from the generative and discriminative representations for automatic FER. We have also addressed the problem of diversification of expressions from lab controlled to real-world scenarios from our cross-database study and proposed a model for enhancement of the discriminative power of deep features while increasing the interclass scatters, by preserving the locality closeness. Furthermore, facial expression consists of an expressive component as well as neutral component, so we proposed a generative model which is capable of generating neutral expression from an input image using cGAN. The expressive component is filtered and passed to the intermediate layers and the process is called De-expression Residue Learning. The residue in the intermediate/middle layers is very important for learning through expressive components. Finally, we validate the effectiveness of our method (DLP-DeRL) through qualitative and quantitative experimental results using four databases. Our method is more accurate and robust, and outperforms all the existing methods (hand crafted features and deep learning) while dealing the images in the wild.

We proposed a facial motion tracking and expression recognition system based on video data. By a 3D deformable facial model, the online statistical model (OSM) and cylinder head model (CHM) were combined to track 3D facial motion in the framework of particle filtering. For facial expression recognition, a fast and efficient algorithm and a robust and precise algorithm were developed. With the first, facial animation and facial expression were retrieved sequentially. After that facial animation was obtained, facial expression was recognized by static facial expression knowledge learned from anatomical analysis. With the second, facial animation and facial expression were simultaneously retrieved to increase the reliability and robustness with noisy input data. Facial expression was recognized by fusing static and dynamic facial expression knowledge, the latter of which was learned by training a multi-class expressional Markov process using a video database. The experiments showed that facial motion tracking by OSM+CHM is more pose robust than that by OSM, and the facial expression score of the robust and precise algorithm is higher than those of other state-of-the-art facial expression recognition methods.

With the widespread use of smart devices, finding effective and intuitive ways of interaction becomes a real challenge. One of the most relevant sources of information remains the facial expressions. Indeed, they provide various information related to the user such as his emotional state. In the last years, several methods of automatic facial expression recognition based on deep learning algorithms have been proposed. Even if they achieve high accuracy in terms of recognition, they require high-performance hardware and huge training datasets. In this paper, we propose an automatic facial expression recognition approach based on the Histogram of Oriented Gradients along with two distinct dimensionality reduction techniques namely Principal Component Analysis and Autoencoder. The proposed approach allows recognizing the six basic emotions using a multi-class Support Vector Machine. We evaluated its performance with three facial expression datasets namely JAFFE, RaFD and KDEF. The obtained results attest to its efficiency with \(93.75\%\), \(87.26\%\), and \(96.27\%\), respectively.

In order to improve the facial expression recognition accuracy in complex contexts and decrease the identification time, this paper presents an efficient expression recognition algorithm based on feature points of the facial landmarks. In practice, facial expressions mainly focus on a few parts of muscle activity, which provides valuable reference to infer human emotions and intentions. Facial expression is a powerful nonverbal way for human to transmit information and reveal emotion. In this paper, we focus on geometric positions of key parts of the face. Firstly, the face area is detected in a photo or video, then the key parts of the face is extracted and the position correction is performed. A set of key points is located using the relative position of the face. This process can not only effectively avoid the impact of the environment and the light on the sample, but also greatly improve the recognition of facial expressions. With the development of human-computer interaction, facial expression recognition has become a hot topic in the field of pattern recognition. After years of development, facial expression recognition has achieved some success such as HOG. In this paper, HOG feature extraction method of facial expression is used as a contrast. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can extract key information and achieves higher recognition accuracy.

Facial Expression Recognition (FER) is a critical method for evaluating the emotional states of patients with mental disorders, playing a significant role in treatment monitoring. However, due to privacy constraints, facial expression data from patients with mental disorders is severely limited. Additionally, the more complex inter-class and intra-class similarities compared to healthy individuals make accurate recognition of facial expressions challenging. Therefore, we propose a Voluntary Facial Expression Mimicry (VFEM) experiment, which collected facial expression data from schizophrenia, depression, and anxiety. This experiment establishes the first dataset designed for facial expression recognition tasks exclusively composed of patients with mental disorders. Simultaneously, based on VFEM, we propose a Vision Transformer FER model tailored for Complex mental disorder patients (CmdVIT). CmdVIT integrates crucial facial expression features through both explicit and implicit mechanisms, including explicit visual center positional encoding and implicit sparse attention center loss function. These two key components enhance positional information and minimize the facial feature space distance between conventional attention and critical attention, effectively suppressing inter-class and intra-class similarities. In various FER tasks for different mental disorders in VFEM, CmdVIT achieves more competitive performance compared to contemporary benchmark models. Our works are available at https://github.com/yjy-97/CmdVIT.

In view of the problem that the convolution neural network research of facial expression recognition ignores the internal relevance of the key links, which leads to the low accuracy and speed of facial expression recognition, and can't meet the recognition requirements, a series cascade algorithm model for expression recognition of educational robot is constructed and enables the educational robot to recognize multiple students' facial expressions simultaneously, quickly and accurately in the process of movement, in the balance of the accuracy, rapidity and stability of the algorithm, based on the cascade convolution neural network model. Through the CK+ and Oulu-CASIA expression recognition database, the expression recognition experiments of this algorithm are compared with the commonly used STM-ExpLet and FN2EN cascade network algorithms. The results show that the accuracy of the expression recognition method is more than 90%. Compared with the other two commonly used cascade convolution neural network methods, the accuracy of expression recognition is significantly improved.

In this paper, we propose a novel scheme for automatic recognition of facial expressions captured from both fronto-parallel and non-fronto-parallel cameras i.e., multi-view facial expressions (MVFE). The proposed scheme introduce a Local Saliency-inspired Binary Pattern (LSiBP) feature to recognize MVFE. First view-specific approximated saliency likelihood map (ASLM) is derived during training of our model. ASLM is determined from the 2D structure tensor representation of faces. The distribution of saliency likelihoods of pixels along with pixel intensities are analyzed in extracting LSiBP features from a face. Such LSiBP features are utilized for training and testing of view-specific SVM classifiers. Extensive experiments are performed on datasets of both posed and unconstrained spontaneous expressions of MVFE. Our scheme outperforms state-of-the-arts by at least 1% to recognize MVFE.

Facial expression recognition based on Local Binary Patterns: A comprehensive study

Automatic facial expression analysis is an important aspect of human machine interaction as the face is an important communicative medium. We use our face to signal interest, disagreement, intentions or mood through subtle facial motions and expressions. Work on automatic facial expression analysis can roughly be divided into the recognition of prototypic facial expressions such as the six basic emotional states and the recognition of atomic facial muscle actions (action units, AUs). Detection of AUs rather than emotions makes facial expression detection independent of culture-dependent interpretation, reduces the dimensionality of the problem and reduces the amount of training data required. Classic psychological studies suggest that humans consciously map AUs onto the basic emotion categories using a finite number of rules. On the other hand, recent studies suggest that humans recognize emotions unconsciously with a process that is perhaps best modeled by artificial neural networks (ANNs). This paper investigates these two claims. A comparison is made between detection of emotions directly from features vs. a two-step approach where we first detect AUs and use the AUs as input to either a rulebase or an ANN to recognize emotions. The results suggest that the two-step approach is possible with a small loss of accuracy and that biologically inspired classification techniques outperform those that approach the classification problem from a logical perspective, suggesting that biologically inspired classifiers are more suitable for computer-based analysis of facial behavior than logic inspired methods

We describe a computer vision system for observing facial motion by using an optimal estimation optical flow method coupled with geometric, physical and motion-based dynamic models describing the facial structure. Our method produces a reliable parametric representation of the face's independent muscle action groups, as well as an accurate estimate of facial motion. Previous efforts at analysis of facial expression have been based on the facial action coding system (FACS), a representation developed in order to allow human psychologists to code expression from static pictures. To avoid use of this heuristic coding scheme, we have used our computer vision system to probabilistically characterize facial motion and muscle activation in an experimental population, thus deriving a new, more accurate, representation of human facial expressions that we call FACS+. Finally, we show how this method can be used for coding, analysis, interpretation, and recognition of facial expressions.