Learning Multi-dimensional Edge Feature-based AU Relation Graph for Facial Action Unit Recognition

This is an official release of the paper

"Learning Multi-dimensional Edge Feature-based AU Relation Graph for Facial Action Unit Recognition", IJCAI-ECAI 2022

[Paper] [Project]

Abstract: The activations of Facial Action Units (AUs) mutually influence one another. While the relationship between a pair of AUs can be complex and unique, existing approaches fail to specifically and explicitly represent such cues for each pair of AUs in each facial display. This paper proposes an AU relationship modelling approach that deep learns a unique graph to explicitly describe the relationship between each pair of AUs of the target facial display. Our approach first encodes each AU's activation status and its association with other AUs into a node feature. Then, it learns a pair of multi-dimensional edge features to describe multiple task-specific relationship cues between each pair of AUs. During both node and edge feature learning, our approach also considers the influence of the unique facial display on AUs' relationship by taking the full face representation as an input. Experimental results on BP4D and DISFA datasets show that both node and edge feature learning modules provide large performance improvements for CNN and transformer-based backbones, with our best systems achieving the state-of-the-art AU recognition results. Our approach not only has a strong capability in modelling relationship cues for AU recognition but also can be easily incorporated into various backbones.

• it encodes both the activation status of the AU and its association with other AUs into each node feature
• it learns a multi-dimensional edge feature to explicitly capture the task-specific relation

The main novelty of the proposed approach in comparison to pre-defined AU graphs and deep learned facial display-specific graphs are illustrated in this figure.

demo-.mp4

🔧 Requirements

• Python 3

• PyTorch

• Check the required python packages in requirements.txt.

pip install -r requirements.txt

Data and Data Prepareing Tools

The Datasets we used:

• BP4D
• DISFA

We provide tools for prepareing data in tool/. After Downloading raw data files, you can use these tools to process them, aligning with our protocals. More details have been described in tool/README.md.

Training with ImageNet pre-trained models

Make sure that you download the ImageNet pre-trained models to checkpoints/ (or you alter the checkpoint path setting in models/resnet.py or models/swin_transformer.py)

The download links of pre-trained models are in checkpoints/checkpoints.txt

Thanks to the offical Pytorch and Swin Transformer

Training and Testing

• to train the first stage of our approach (ResNet-50) on BP4D Dataset, run:

python train_stage1.py --dataset BP4D --arc resnet50 --exp-name resnet50_first_stage -b 64 -lr 0.0001 --fold 1 

• to train the second stage of our approach (ResNet-50) on BP4D Dataset, run:

python train_stage2.py --dataset BP4D --arc resnet50 --exp-name resnet50_second_stage  --resume results/resnet50_first_stage/bs_64_seed_0_lr_0.0001/xxxx_fold1.pth --fold 1 --lam 0.05

• to train the first stage of our approach (Swin-B) on DISFA Dataset, run:

python train_stage1.py --dataset DISFA --arc swin_transformer_base --exp-name swin_transformer_base_first_stage -b 64 -lr 0.0001 --fold 2

• to train the second stage of our approach (Swin-B) on DISFA Dataset, run:

python train_stage2.py --dataset DISFA --arc swin_transformer_base --exp-name swin_transformer_base_second_stage  --resume results/swin_transformer_base_first_stage/bs_64_seed_0_lr_0.0001/xxxx_fold2.pth -b 64 -lr 0.000001 --fold 2 --lam 0.01 

• to test the performance on DISFA Dataset, run:

python test.py --dataset DISFA --arc swin_transformer_base --exp-name test_fold2  --resume results/swin_transformer_base_second_stage/bs_64_seed_0_lr_0.000001/xxxx_fold2.pth --fold 2

Pretrained models

BP4D

arch_type	GoogleDrive link	Average F1-score
Ours (ResNet-18)	-	-
Ours (ResNet-50)	link	64.7
Ours (ResNet-101)	link	64.8
Ours (Swin-Tiny)	link	65.6
Ours (Swin-Small)	link	65.1
Ours (Swin-Base)	link	65.5

DISFA

arch_type	GoogleDrive link	Average F1-score
Ours (ResNet-18)	-	-
Ours (ResNet-50)	link	63.1
Ours (ResNet-101)	-	-
Ours (Swin-Tiny)	-	-
Ours (Swin-Small)	-	-
Ours (Swin-Base)	link	62.4

Download these files (e.g. ME-GraphAU_swin_base_BP4D.zip) and unzip them, each of which involves the checkpoints of three folds.

📝 Main Results

BP4D

Method	AU1	AU2	AU4	AU6	AU7	AU10	AU12	AU14	AU15	AU17	AU23	AU24	Avg.
EAC-Net	39.0	35.2	48.6	76.1	72.9	81.9	86.2	58.8	37.5	59.1	35.9	35.8	55.9
JAA-Net	47.2	44.0	54.9	77.5	74.6	84.0	86.9	61.9	43.6	60.3	42.7	41.9	60.0
LP-Net	43.4	38.0	54.2	77.1	76.7	83.8	87.2	63.3	45.3	60.5	48.1	54.2	61.0
ARL	45.8	39.8	55.1	75.7	77.2	82.3	86.6	58.8	47.6	62.1	47.4	55.4	61.1
SEV-Net	58.2	50.4	58.3	81.9	73.9	87.8	87.5	61.6	52.6	62.2	44.6	47.6	63.9
FAUDT	51.7	49.3	61.0	77.8	79.5	82.9	86.3	67.6	51.9	63.0	43.7	56.3	64.2
SRERL	46.9	45.3	55.6	77.1	78.4	83.5	87.6	63.9	52.2	63.9	47.1	53.3	62.9
UGN-B	54.2	46.4	56.8	76.2	76.7	82.4	86.1	64.7	51.2	63.1	48.5	53.6	63.3
HMP-PS	53.1	46.1	56.0	76.5	76.9	82.1	86.4	64.8	51.5	63.0	49.9	54.5	63.4
Ours (ResNet-50)	53.7	46.9	59.0	78.5	80.0	84.4	87.8	67.3	52.5	63.2	50.6	52.4	64.7
Ours (Swin-B)	52.7	44.3	60.9	79.9	80.1	85.3	89.2	69.4	55.4	64.4	49.8	55.1	65.5

DISFA

Method	AU1	AU2	AU4	AU6	AU9	AU12	AU25	AU26	Avg.
EAC-Net	41.5	26.4	66.4	50.7	80.5	89.3	88.9	15.6	48.5
JAA-Net	43.7	46.2	56.0	41.4	44.7	69.6	88.3	58.4	56.0
LP-Net	29.9	24.7	72.7	46.8	49.6	72.9	93.8	65.0	56.9
ARL	43.9	42.1	63.6	41.8	40.0	76.2	95.2	66.8	58.7
SEV-Net	55.3	53.1	61.5	53.6	38.2	71.6	95.7	41.5	58.8
FAUDT	46.1	48.6	72.8	56.7	50.0	72.1	90.8	55.4	61.5
SRERL	45.7	47.8	59.6	47.1	45.6	73.5	84.3	43.6	55.9
UGN-B	43.3	48.1	63.4	49.5	48.2	72.9	90.8	59.0	60.0
HMP-PS	38.0	45.9	65.2	50.9	50.8	76.0	93.3	67.6	61.0
Ours (ResNet-50)	54.6	47.1	72.9	54.0	55.7	76.7	91.1	53.0	63.1
Ours (Swin-B)	52.5	45.7	76.1	51.8	46.5	76.1	92.9	57.6	62.4

🎓 Citation

if the code or method help you in the research, please cite the following paper:

@article{luo2022learning,
title = {Learning Multi-dimensional Edge Feature-based AU Relation Graph for Facial Action Unit Recognition},
author = {Luo, Cheng and Song, Siyang and Xie, Weicheng and Shen, Linlin and Gunes, Hatice},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.01782},
year={2022}
}


@inproceedings{luo2022learning,
  title     = {Learning Multi-dimensional Edge Feature-based AU Relation Graph for Facial Action Unit Recognition},
  author    = {Luo, Cheng and Song, Siyang and Xie, Weicheng and Shen, Linlin and Gunes, Hatice},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Joint Conference on
               Artificial Intelligence, {IJCAI-22}},
  pages     = {1239--1246},
  year      = {2022}
}