Abstract: In this paper we present a study on the use of Action Units as mid-level features for automatically recognizing basic and subtle emotions. We propose a representation model based on mid-level facial muscular movement features. We encode these movements dynamically using the Facial Action Coding System, and propose to use these intermediate features based on Action Units (AUs) to classify emotions. AUs activations are detected fusing a set of spatiotemporal geometric and appearance features. The algorithm is validated in two applications: (i) the recognition of 7 basic emotions using the publicly available Cohn-Kanade database, and (ii) the inference of subtle emotional cues in the Newscast database. In this second scenario, we consider emotions that are perceived cumulatively in longer periods of time. In particular, we Automatically classify whether video shoots from public News TV channels refer to Good or Bad news. To deal with the different video lengths we propose a Histogram of Action Units and compute it using a sliding window strategy on the frame sequences. Our approach achieves accuracies close to human perception.

Abstract: PR4883, PII: S0031-3203(13)00327-0
Two-dimensional shape models have been successfully applied to solve many problems in computer vision, such as object tracking, recognition, and segmentation. Typically, 2D shape models are learned from a discrete set of image landmarks (corresponding to projection of 3D points of an object), after applying Generalized Procustes Analysis (GPA) to remove 2D rigid transformations. However, the
standard GPA process suffers from three main limitations. Firstly, the 2D training samples do not necessarily cover a uniform sampling of all the 3D transformations of an object. This can bias the estimate of the shape model. Secondly, it can be computationally expensive to learn the shape model by sampling 3D transformations. Thirdly, standard GPA methods use only one reference shape, which can might be insufficient to capture large structural variability of some objects.
To address these drawbacks, this paper proposes continuous generalized Procrustes analysis (CGPA).
CGPA uses a continuous formulation that avoids the need to generate 2D projections from all the rigid 3D transformations. It builds an efficient (in space and time) non-biased 2D shape model from a set of 3D model of objects. A major challenge in CGPA is the need to integrate over the space of 3D rotations, especially when the rotations are parameterized with Euler angles. To address this problem, we introduce the use of the Haar measure. Finally, we extended CGPA to incorporate several reference shapes. Experimental results on synthetic and real experiments show the benefits of CGPA over GPA.