Facial Expressions Analysis Under Occlusions Based on Specificities of Facial Motion Propagation

Delphine Poux (1, 2) , Benjamin Allaert (2) , José Mennesson (2, 3, 4) , Nacim Ihaddadene (5) , Ioan Marius Bilasco (1, 6, 2) , Chaabane Djeraba (2, 1)

1 Université de Lille
2 CRIStAL - Centre de Recherche en Informatique, Signal et Automatique de Lille - UMR 9189
3 CERI SN - IMT Nord Europe - Centre for Digital Systems
4 IMT Nord Europe - Ecole nationale supérieure Mines-Télécom Lille Douai
5 Yncréa Hauts-de-France
6 LIFL - FOX MIIRE

Although much progress has been made in the facial expression analysis field, facial occlusions are still challenging. The main innovation brought by this contribution consists in exploiting the specificities of facial movement propagation for recognizing expressions in presence of important occlusions. The movement induced by an expression extends beyond the movement epicenter. Thus, the movement occurring in an occluded region propagates towards neighboring visible regions. In presence of occlusions, per expression, we compute the importance of each unoccluded facial region and we construct adapted facial frameworks that boost the performance of per expression binary classifier. The output of each expression-dependant binary classifier is then aggregated and fed into a fusion process that aims constructing, per occlusion, a unique model that recognizes all the facial expressions considered. The evaluations highlight the robustness of this approach in presence of significant facial occlusions.

Mots clés: Facial occlusions; motion propagation; facial framework; Facial expressions; facial expressions

Domaines: Vision par ordinateur et reconnaissance de formes [cs.CV]

Delphine Poux, Benjamin Allaert, José Mennesson, Nacim Ihaddadene, Ioan Marius Bilasco, et al.. Facial Expressions Analysis Under Occlusions Based on Specificities of Facial Motion Propagation. Multimedia Tools and Applications, In press. ⟨hal-02859856⟩