Guided Interpretable Facial Expression Recognition via Spatial Action Unit Cues

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Belharbi, Soufiane, Pedersoli, Marco, Koerich, Alessandro Lameiras, Bacon, Simon, Granger, Eric
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Belharbi, Soufiane
Pedersoli, Marco
Koerich, Alessandro Lameiras
Bacon, Simon
Granger, Eric
author_facet Belharbi, Soufiane
Pedersoli, Marco
Koerich, Alessandro Lameiras
Bacon, Simon
Granger, Eric
contents Although state-of-the-art classifiers for facial expression recognition (FER) can achieve a high level of accuracy, they lack interpretability, an important feature for end-users. Experts typically associate spatial action units (\aus) from a codebook to facial regions for the visual interpretation of expressions. In this paper, the same expert steps are followed. A new learning strategy is proposed to explicitly incorporate \au cues into classifier training, allowing to train deep interpretable models. During training, this \au codebook is used, along with the input image expression label, and facial landmarks, to construct a \au heatmap that indicates the most discriminative image regions of interest w.r.t the facial expression. This valuable spatial cue is leveraged to train a deep interpretable classifier for FER. This is achieved by constraining the spatial layer features of a classifier to be correlated with \au heatmaps. Using a composite loss, the classifier is trained to correctly classify an image while yielding interpretable visual layer-wise attention correlated with \au maps, simulating the expert decision process. Our strategy only relies on image class expression for supervision, without additional manual annotations. Our new strategy is generic, and can be applied to any deep CNN- or transformer-based classifier without requiring any architectural change or significant additional training time. Our extensive evaluation on two public benchmarks \rafdb, and \affectnet datasets shows that our proposed strategy can improve layer-wise interpretability without degrading classification performance. In addition, we explore a common type of interpretable classifiers that rely on class activation mapping (CAM) methods, and show that our approach can also improve CAM interpretability.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_00281
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Guided Interpretable Facial Expression Recognition via Spatial Action Unit Cues
Belharbi, Soufiane
Pedersoli, Marco
Koerich, Alessandro Lameiras
Bacon, Simon
Granger, Eric
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Although state-of-the-art classifiers for facial expression recognition (FER) can achieve a high level of accuracy, they lack interpretability, an important feature for end-users. Experts typically associate spatial action units (\aus) from a codebook to facial regions for the visual interpretation of expressions. In this paper, the same expert steps are followed. A new learning strategy is proposed to explicitly incorporate \au cues into classifier training, allowing to train deep interpretable models. During training, this \au codebook is used, along with the input image expression label, and facial landmarks, to construct a \au heatmap that indicates the most discriminative image regions of interest w.r.t the facial expression. This valuable spatial cue is leveraged to train a deep interpretable classifier for FER. This is achieved by constraining the spatial layer features of a classifier to be correlated with \au heatmaps. Using a composite loss, the classifier is trained to correctly classify an image while yielding interpretable visual layer-wise attention correlated with \au maps, simulating the expert decision process. Our strategy only relies on image class expression for supervision, without additional manual annotations. Our new strategy is generic, and can be applied to any deep CNN- or transformer-based classifier without requiring any architectural change or significant additional training time. Our extensive evaluation on two public benchmarks \rafdb, and \affectnet datasets shows that our proposed strategy can improve layer-wise interpretability without degrading classification performance. In addition, we explore a common type of interpretable classifiers that rely on class activation mapping (CAM) methods, and show that our approach can also improve CAM interpretability.
title Guided Interpretable Facial Expression Recognition via Spatial Action Unit Cues
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.00281