Abstract: Emotion recognition has a key role in affective computing. Recently, fine-grained emotion analysis, such as compound facial expression of emotions, has attracted high interest of researchers working on affective computing. A compound facial emotion includes dominant and complementary emotions (e.g., happily-disgusted and sadly-fearful), which is more detailed than the seven classical facial emotions (e.g., happy, disgust, and so on). Current studies on compound emotions are limited to use data sets with limited number of categories and unbalanced data distributions, with labels obtained automatically by machine learning-based algorithms which could lead to inaccuracies. To address these problems, we released the iCV-MEFED data set, which includes 50 classes of compound emotions and labels assessed by psychologists. The task is challenging due to high similarities of compound facial emotions from different categories. In addition, we have organized a challenge based on the proposed iCV-MEFED data set, held at FG workshop 2017. In this paper, we analyze the top three winner methods and perform further detailed experiments on the proposed data set. Experiments indicate that pairs of compound emotion (e.g., surprisingly-happy vs happily-surprised) are more difficult to be recognized if compared with the seven basic emotions. However, we hope the proposed data set can help to pave the way for further research on compound facial emotion recognition.

Abstract: Transformer models have shown great success handling long-range interactions, making them a promising tool for modeling video. However, they lack inductive biases and scale quadratically with input length. These limitations are further exacerbated when dealing with the high dimensionality introduced by the temporal dimension. While there are surveys analyzing the advances of Transformers for vision, none focus on an in-depth analysis of video-specific designs. In this survey, we analyze the main contributions and trends of works leveraging Transformers to model video. Specifically, we delve into how videos are handled at the input level first. Then, we study the architectural changes made to deal with video more efficiently, reduce redundancy, re-introduce useful inductive biases, and capture long-term temporal dynamics. In addition, we provide an overview of different training regimes and explore effective self-supervised learning strategies for video. Finally, we conduct a performance comparison on the most common benchmark for Video Transformers (i.e., action classification), finding them to outperform 3D ConvNets even with less computational complexity.

Abstract: Action recognition is a challenging task that plays an important role in many robotic systems, which highly depend on visual input feeds. However, due to privacy concerns, it is important to find a method which can recognise actions without using visual feed. In this paper, we propose a concept for detecting actions while preserving the test subject’s privacy. Our proposed method relies only on recording the temporal evolution of light pulses scattered back from the scene.
Such data trace to record one action contains a sequence of one-dimensional arrays of voltage values acquired by a single-pixel detector at 1 GHz repetition rate. Information about both the distance to the object and its shape are embedded in the traces. We apply machine learning in the form of recurrent neural networks for data analysis and demonstrate successful action recognition. The experimental results show that our proposed method could achieve on average 96.47% accuracy on the actions walking forward, walking backwards, sitting down, standing up and waving hand, using recurrent
neural network.