Unlike the conventional facial expressions, micro-expressions are involuntary and transient facial expressions capable of revealing the genuine emotions that people attempt to hide. Therefore, they can provide important information in a broad range of applications such as lie detection, criminal detection, etc. Since micro-expressions are transient and of low intensity, however, their detection and recognition is difficult and relies heavily on expert experiences. Due to its intrinsic particularity and complexity, video-based micro-expression analysis is attractive but challenging, and has recently become an active area of research. Although there have been numerous developments in this area, thus far there has been no comprehensive survey that provides researchers with a systematic overview of these developments with a unified evaluation. Accordingly, in this survey paper, we first highlight the key differences between macro- and micro-expressions, then use these differences to guide our research survey of video-based micro-expression analysis in a cascaded structure, encompassing the neuropsychological basis, datasets, features, spotting algorithms, recognition algorithms, applications and evaluation of state-of-the-art approaches. For each aspect, the basic techniques, advanced developments and major challenges are addressed and discussed. Furthermore, after considering the limitations of existing micro-expression datasets, we present and release a new dataset - called micro-and-macro expression warehouse (MMEW) - containing more video samples and more labeled emotion types. We then perform a unified comparison of representative methods on CAS(ME)2 for spotting, and on MMEW and SAMM for recognition, respectively. Finally, some potential future research directions are explored and outlined.
Given its status as a classic problem and its importance to both theoreticians and practitioners, edit distance provides an excellent lens through which to understand how the theoretical analysis of algorithms impacts practical implementations. From an applied perspective, the goals of theoretical analysis are to predict the empirical performance of an algorithm and to serve as a yardstick to design novel algorithms that perform well in practice. In this paper, we systematically survey the types of theoretical analysis techniques that have been applied to edit distance and evaluate the extent to which each one has achieved these two goals. These techniques include traditional worst-case analysis, worst-case analysis parametrized by edit distance or entropy or compressibility, average-case analysis, semi-random models, and advice-based models. We find that the track record is mixed. On one hand, two algorithms widely used in practice have been born out of theoretical analysis and their empirical performance is captured well by theoretical predictions. On the other hand, all the algorithms developed using theoretical analysis as a yardstick since then have not had any practical relevance. We conclude by discussing the remaining open problems and how they can be tackled.
Facial expression recognition plays an important role in human-computer interaction. In this paper, we propose the Coarse-to-Fine Cascaded network with Smooth Predicting (CFC-SP) to improve the performance of facial expression recognition. CFC-SP contains two core components, namely Coarse-to-Fine Cascaded networks (CFC) and Smooth Predicting (SP). For CFC, it first groups several similar emotions to form a rough category, and then employs a network to conduct a coarse but accurate classification. Later, an additional network for these grouped emotions is further used to obtain fine-grained predictions. For SP, it improves the recognition capability of the model by capturing both universal and unique expression features. To be specific, the universal features denote the general characteristic of facial emotions within a period and the unique features denote the specific characteristic at this moment. Experiments on Aff-Wild2 show the effectiveness of the proposed CFSP. We achieved 3rd place in the Expression Classification Challenge of the 3rd Competition on Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild. The code will be released at //github.com/BR-IDL/PaddleViT.
Human action recognition and analysis have great demand and important application significance in video surveillance, video retrieval, and human-computer interaction. The task of human action quality evaluation requires the intelligent system to automatically and objectively evaluate the action completed by the human. The action quality assessment model can reduce the human and material resources spent in action evaluation and reduce subjectivity. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of existing papers on video-based action quality assessment. Different from human action recognition, the application scenario of action quality assessment is relatively narrow. Most of the existing work focuses on sports and medical care. We first introduce the definition and challenges of human action quality assessment. Then we present the existing datasets and evaluation metrics. In addition, we summarized the methods of sports and medical care according to the model categories and publishing institutions according to the characteristics of the two fields. At the end, combined with recent work, the promising development direction in action quality assessment is discussed.
Micro-expressions are spontaneous, unconscious facial movements that show people's true inner emotions and have great potential in related fields of psychological testing. Since the face is a 3D deformation object, the occurrence of an expression can arouse spatial deformation of the face, but limited by the available databases are 2D videos, lacking the description of 3D spatial information of micro-expressions. Therefore, we proposed a new micro-expression database containing 2D video sequences and 3D point clouds sequences. The database includes 373 micro-expressions sequences, and these samples were classified using the objective method based on facial action coding system, as well as the non-objective method that combines video contents and participants' self-reports. We extracted 2D and 3D features using the local binary patterns on three orthogonal planes (LBP-TOP) and curvature algorithms, respectively, and evaluated the classification accuracies of these two features and their fusion results with leave-one-subject-out (LOSO) and 10-fold cross-validation. Further, we performed various neural network algorithms for database classification, the results show that classification accuracies are improved by fusing 3D features than using only 2D features. The database offers original and cropped micro-expression samples, which will facilitate the exploration and research on 3D Spatio-temporal features of micro-expressions.
Human affective behavior analysis has received much attention in human-computer interaction (HCI). In this paper, we introduce our submission to the CVPR 2022 Competition on Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW). To fully exploit affective knowledge from multiple views, we utilize the multimodal features of spoken words, speech prosody, and facial expression, which are extracted from the video clips in the Aff-Wild2 dataset. Based on these features, we propose a unified transformer-based multimodal framework for Action Unit detection and also expression recognition. Specifically, the static vision feature is first encoded from the current frame image. At the same time, we clip its adjacent frames by a sliding window and extract three kinds of multimodal features from the sequence of images, audio, and text. Then, we introduce a transformer-based fusion module that integrates the static vision features and the dynamic multimodal features. The cross-attention module in the fusion module makes the output integrated features focus on the crucial parts that facilitate the downstream detection tasks. We also leverage some data balancing techniques, data augmentation techniques, and postprocessing methods to further improve the model performance. In the official test of ABAW3 Competition, our model ranks first in the EXPR and AU tracks. The extensive quantitative evaluations, as well as ablation studies on the Aff-Wild2 dataset, prove the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Owing to effective and flexible data acquisition, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has recently become a hotspot across the fields of computer vision (CV) and remote sensing (RS). Inspired by recent success of deep learning (DL), many advanced object detection and tracking approaches have been widely applied to various UAV-related tasks, such as environmental monitoring, precision agriculture, traffic management. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on the research progress and prospects of DL-based UAV object detection and tracking methods. More specifically, we first outline the challenges, statistics of existing methods, and provide solutions from the perspectives of DL-based models in three research topics: object detection from the image, object detection from the video, and object tracking from the video. Open datasets related to UAV-dominated object detection and tracking are exhausted, and four benchmark datasets are employed for performance evaluation using some state-of-the-art methods. Finally, prospects and considerations for the future work are discussed and summarized. It is expected that this survey can facilitate those researchers who come from remote sensing field with an overview of DL-based UAV object detection and tracking methods, along with some thoughts on their further developments.
In this paper, we propose a novel Feature Decomposition and Reconstruction Learning (FDRL) method for effective facial expression recognition. We view the expression information as the combination of the shared information (expression similarities) across different expressions and the unique information (expression-specific variations) for each expression. More specifically, FDRL mainly consists of two crucial networks: a Feature Decomposition Network (FDN) and a Feature Reconstruction Network (FRN). In particular, FDN first decomposes the basic features extracted from a backbone network into a set of facial action-aware latent features to model expression similarities. Then, FRN captures the intra-feature and inter-feature relationships for latent features to characterize expression-specific variations, and reconstructs the expression feature. To this end, two modules including an intra-feature relation modeling module and an inter-feature relation modeling module are developed in FRN. Experimental results on both the in-the-lab databases (including CK+, MMI, and Oulu-CASIA) and the in-the-wild databases (including RAF-DB and SFEW) show that the proposed FDRL method consistently achieves higher recognition accuracy than several state-of-the-art methods. This clearly highlights the benefit of feature decomposition and reconstruction for classifying expressions.
Detection and recognition of text in natural images are two main problems in the field of computer vision that have a wide variety of applications in analysis of sports videos, autonomous driving, industrial automation, to name a few. They face common challenging problems that are factors in how text is represented and affected by several environmental conditions. The current state-of-the-art scene text detection and/or recognition methods have exploited the witnessed advancement in deep learning architectures and reported a superior accuracy on benchmark datasets when tackling multi-resolution and multi-oriented text. However, there are still several remaining challenges affecting text in the wild images that cause existing methods to underperform due to there models are not able to generalize to unseen data and the insufficient labeled data. Thus, unlike previous surveys in this field, the objectives of this survey are as follows: first, offering the reader not only a review on the recent advancement in scene text detection and recognition, but also presenting the results of conducting extensive experiments using a unified evaluation framework that assesses pre-trained models of the selected methods on challenging cases, and applies the same evaluation criteria on these techniques. Second, identifying several existing challenges for detecting or recognizing text in the wild images, namely, in-plane-rotation, multi-oriented and multi-resolution text, perspective distortion, illumination reflection, partial occlusion, complex fonts, and special characters. Finally, the paper also presents insight into the potential research directions in this field to address some of the mentioned challenges that are still encountering scene text detection and recognition techniques.
In recent years, there has been an exponential growth in the number of complex documents and texts that require a deeper understanding of machine learning methods to be able to accurately classify texts in many applications. Many machine learning approaches have achieved surpassing results in natural language processing. The success of these learning algorithms relies on their capacity to understand complex models and non-linear relationships within data. However, finding suitable structures, architectures, and techniques for text classification is a challenge for researchers. In this paper, a brief overview of text classification algorithms is discussed. This overview covers different text feature extractions, dimensionality reduction methods, existing algorithms and techniques, and evaluations methods. Finally, the limitations of each technique and their application in the real-world problem are discussed.
Transfer learning aims at improving the performance of target learners on target domains by transferring the knowledge contained in different but related source domains. In this way, the dependence on a large number of target domain data can be reduced for constructing target learners. Due to the wide application prospects, transfer learning has become a popular and promising area in machine learning. Although there are already some valuable and impressive surveys on transfer learning, these surveys introduce approaches in a relatively isolated way and lack the recent advances in transfer learning. As the rapid expansion of the transfer learning area, it is both necessary and challenging to comprehensively review the relevant studies. This survey attempts to connect and systematize the existing transfer learning researches, as well as to summarize and interpret the mechanisms and the strategies in a comprehensive way, which may help readers have a better understanding of the current research status and ideas. Different from previous surveys, this survey paper reviews over forty representative transfer learning approaches from the perspectives of data and model. The applications of transfer learning are also briefly introduced. In order to show the performance of different transfer learning models, twenty representative transfer learning models are used for experiments. The models are performed on three different datasets, i.e., Amazon Reviews, Reuters-21578, and Office-31. And the experimental results demonstrate the importance of selecting appropriate transfer learning models for different applications in practice.