Pain in 3D: Generating Controllable Synthetic Faces for Automated Pain Assessment

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Lin, Xin Lei, Mehraban, Soroush, Moturu, Abhishek, Taati, Babak
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Lin, Xin Lei
Mehraban, Soroush
Moturu, Abhishek
Taati, Babak
author_facet Lin, Xin Lei
Mehraban, Soroush
Moturu, Abhishek
Taati, Babak
contents Automated pain assessment from facial expressions is crucial for non-communicative patients, such as those with dementia. Progress has been limited by two challenges: (i) existing datasets exhibit severe demographic and label imbalance due to ethical constraints, and (ii) current generative models cannot precisely control facial action units (AUs), facial structure, or clinically validated pain levels. We present 3DPain, a large-scale synthetic dataset specifically designed for automated pain assessment, featuring unprecedented annotation richness and demographic diversity. Our three-stage framework generates diverse 3D meshes, textures them with diffusion models, and applies AU-driven face rigging to synthesize multi-view faces with paired neutral and pain images, AU configurations, PSPI scores, and the first dataset-level annotations of pain-region heatmaps. The dataset comprises 82,500 samples across 25,000 pain expression heatmaps and 2,500 synthetic identities balanced by age, gender, and ethnicity. We further introduce ViTPain, a Vision Transformer based cross-modal distillation framework in which a heatmap-trained teacher guides a student trained on RGB images, enhancing accuracy, interpretability, and clinical reliability. Together, 3DPain and ViTPain establish a controllable, diverse, and clinically grounded foundation for generalizable automated pain assessment.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_16727
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Pain in 3D: Generating Controllable Synthetic Faces for Automated Pain Assessment
Lin, Xin Lei
Mehraban, Soroush
Moturu, Abhishek
Taati, Babak
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Automated pain assessment from facial expressions is crucial for non-communicative patients, such as those with dementia. Progress has been limited by two challenges: (i) existing datasets exhibit severe demographic and label imbalance due to ethical constraints, and (ii) current generative models cannot precisely control facial action units (AUs), facial structure, or clinically validated pain levels. We present 3DPain, a large-scale synthetic dataset specifically designed for automated pain assessment, featuring unprecedented annotation richness and demographic diversity. Our three-stage framework generates diverse 3D meshes, textures them with diffusion models, and applies AU-driven face rigging to synthesize multi-view faces with paired neutral and pain images, AU configurations, PSPI scores, and the first dataset-level annotations of pain-region heatmaps. The dataset comprises 82,500 samples across 25,000 pain expression heatmaps and 2,500 synthetic identities balanced by age, gender, and ethnicity. We further introduce ViTPain, a Vision Transformer based cross-modal distillation framework in which a heatmap-trained teacher guides a student trained on RGB images, enhancing accuracy, interpretability, and clinical reliability. Together, 3DPain and ViTPain establish a controllable, diverse, and clinically grounded foundation for generalizable automated pain assessment.
title Pain in 3D: Generating Controllable Synthetic Faces for Automated Pain Assessment
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16727