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Main Authors: Tellamekala, Mani Kumar, Jaiswal, Shashank, Smith, Thomas, Alamev, Timur, McKeown, Gary, Brown, Anthony, Valstar, Michel
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.05043
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author Tellamekala, Mani Kumar
Jaiswal, Shashank
Smith, Thomas
Alamev, Timur
McKeown, Gary
Brown, Anthony
Valstar, Michel
author_facet Tellamekala, Mani Kumar
Jaiswal, Shashank
Smith, Thomas
Alamev, Timur
McKeown, Gary
Brown, Anthony
Valstar, Michel
contents Recognising expressive behaviours in face videos is a long-standing challenge in Affective Computing. Despite significant advancements in recent years, it still remains a challenge to build a robust and reliable system for naturalistic and in-the-wild facial expressive behaviour analysis in real time. This paper addresses two key challenges in building such a system: (1). The paucity of large-scale labelled facial affect video datasets with extensive coverage of the 2D emotion space, and (2). The difficulty of extracting facial video features that are discriminative, interpretable, robust, and computationally efficient. Toward addressing these challenges, this work introduces xTrace, a robust tool for facial expressive behaviour analysis and predicting continuous values of dimensional emotions, namely valence and arousal, from in-the-wild face videos. To address challenge (1), the proposed affect recognition model is trained on the largest facial affect video data set, containing $\sim$450k videos that cover most emotion zones in the dimensional emotion space, making xTrace highly versatile in analysing a wide spectrum of naturalistic expressive behaviours. To address challenge (2), xTrace uses facial affect descriptors that are not only explainable, but can also achieve a high degree of accuracy and robustness with low computational complexity. The key components of xTrace are benchmarked against three existing tools: MediaPipe, OpenFace, and Augsburg Affect Toolbox. On an in-the-wild benchmarking set composed of $\sim$50k videos, xTrace achieves 0.86 mean Concordance Correlation Coefficient (CCC) and on the SEWA test set it achieves 0.75 mean CCC, outperforming existing SOTA by $\sim$7.1\%.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_05043
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle xTrace: A Facial Expressive Behaviour Analysis Tool for Continuous Affect Recognition
Tellamekala, Mani Kumar
Jaiswal, Shashank
Smith, Thomas
Alamev, Timur
McKeown, Gary
Brown, Anthony
Valstar, Michel
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Recognising expressive behaviours in face videos is a long-standing challenge in Affective Computing. Despite significant advancements in recent years, it still remains a challenge to build a robust and reliable system for naturalistic and in-the-wild facial expressive behaviour analysis in real time. This paper addresses two key challenges in building such a system: (1). The paucity of large-scale labelled facial affect video datasets with extensive coverage of the 2D emotion space, and (2). The difficulty of extracting facial video features that are discriminative, interpretable, robust, and computationally efficient. Toward addressing these challenges, this work introduces xTrace, a robust tool for facial expressive behaviour analysis and predicting continuous values of dimensional emotions, namely valence and arousal, from in-the-wild face videos. To address challenge (1), the proposed affect recognition model is trained on the largest facial affect video data set, containing $\sim$450k videos that cover most emotion zones in the dimensional emotion space, making xTrace highly versatile in analysing a wide spectrum of naturalistic expressive behaviours. To address challenge (2), xTrace uses facial affect descriptors that are not only explainable, but can also achieve a high degree of accuracy and robustness with low computational complexity. The key components of xTrace are benchmarked against three existing tools: MediaPipe, OpenFace, and Augsburg Affect Toolbox. On an in-the-wild benchmarking set composed of $\sim$50k videos, xTrace achieves 0.86 mean Concordance Correlation Coefficient (CCC) and on the SEWA test set it achieves 0.75 mean CCC, outperforming existing SOTA by $\sim$7.1\%.
title xTrace: A Facial Expressive Behaviour Analysis Tool for Continuous Affect Recognition
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.05043