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Global-Local Attention for Context-aware Emotion Recognition (Part 2)

In this part, we will conduct experiements for validating the effectiveness of our proposed Global-Local Attention for Context-aware Emotion Recognition. Here, we only focus on static images with background context as our input. Therefore, we choose the static CAER (CAER-S) dataset [2] to validate our method. However, while experimenting with the CAER-S dataset, we observe that there is a correlation between images in the training and the test sets, which can make the model less robust to changes in data and may not generalize well on unseen samples. More specifically, many images in the training and the test set of the CAER-S dataset are extracted from the same video, hence making them look very similar to each other. To properly evaluate the models, we propose a new way to extract static frames from the CAER video clips to create a new static image dataset called Novel CAER-S (NCAER-S). In particular, for each video in the original CAER dataset, we split the video into multiple parts. Then we randomly select one frame of each part to include in the new NCAER-S dataset. Any original video that provides frames for the training set will be removed from the testing set. This process assures the new dataset is novel while the training frames and testing frames are never from one original input video.

Context-aware emotion recognition results

Table 1. Comparison with recent methods on the CAER-S dataset.

Table 1 summarizes the results of our network and other recent state-of-the-art methods on the CAER-S dataset [2]. This table clearly shows that integrating our GLA module can significantly improve the accuracy performance of the recent CAER-Net. In particular, our GLAMOR-Net (original) achieves 77.90% accuracy, which is a +4.38% improvement over the CAER-Net-S. When compared with other recent state-of-the-art approaches, the table clearly demonstrates that our GLAMOR-Net (ResNet-18) outperforms all those methods and achieves a new state-of-the-art performance with an accuracy of 89.88%. This result confirms our global-local attention mechanism can effectively encode both facial information and context information to improve the human emotion classification results.

Component Analysis

To further analyze the contribution of each component in our proposed method, we experiment with 4 different input settings on the NCAER-S dataset: (i) face only, (ii) context only with the facial region being masked, (iii) context only with the facial region visible, and (iv) both face and context (with masked face). When the context information is used, we compare the performance of the model with different context attention approaches. Note that to compute the saliency map with the proposed GLA in the (ii) and (iii) setting, we extract facial features using the Facial Encoding Module, however, these features are only used as the input of the GLA module to guide the context attention map learning process and not as the input of the Fusion Network to predict the emotion category. The results of these settings are summarized in Table 2.

Table 2. Ablation study of our proposed method on the NCAER-S dataset. w/F, w/mC, w/fC, w/CA, w/GLA denote using the output of the Facial Encoding Module, the Context Encoding Module with masked faces as input, the Context Encoding Module with visible faces as input, the standard attention in [2] and our proposed GLA, respectively, as input to the Fusion Network.

The results clearly show that our GLA consistently helps improve performance in all settings. Specifically, in setting (ii), using our GLA achieves an improvement of 1.06\% over method without attention. Our GLA also improves the performance of the model when both facial and context information is used to predict emotion. Specifically, our model with GLA achieves the best result with an accuracy of 46.91\%, which is higher than the method with no attention 3.72\%. The results from Table 2 show the effectiveness of our Global-Local Attention module for the task of emotion recognition. They also verify that the use of both the local face region and global context information is essential for improving emotion recognition accuracy.

Qualitative Analysis

Figure 5 shows the qualitative visualization with learned attention maps obtained by our method GLAMOR-Net in comparison with CAER-Net-S. It can be seen that our Global-Local Attention mechanism produces better saliency maps and helps the model attend to the right discriminative regions in the surrounding background than the attention map produced by CAER-Net-S. As we can see, our model is able to focus on the gesture of the person (Figure 5f) and also the face of surrounding people (Figure 5c and 5d) to infer the emotion accurately.

Figure 5.Visualization of the attention maps. From top to bottom: original image in the NCAER-S dataset, image with masked face, attention map of the CAER-Net-S, and attention map of our GLAMOR-Net.

Figure 6 shows some emotion recognition results of different approaches on the CAER-S dataset. More specifically, the first two rows (i) and (ii) contain predictions of the CAER-Net-S while the last two rows (iii) and (iv) show the results of our GLAMOR-Net. In some cases, our model was able to exploit the context effectively to perform inference accurately. For instance, with the same sad image input (shown on the (i) and (iii) rows), the CAER-Net-S misclassified it as neutral while the GLAMOR-Net correctly recognized the true emotion category. It might be because our model was able to identify that the man was hugging and appeasing the woman and inferred that they were sad. Another example is shown on the (i) and (iii) rows of the fear column. Our model classified the input accurately, while the CAER-Net-S is confused between the facial expression and the wedding surrounding, thus incorrectly predicted the emotion as happy.

Figure 5. Example predictions on the test set. The first two rows (i) and (ii) show the results of the CAER-Net-S while the last two rows (iii) and (iv) demonstrate predictions of our GLAMOR-Net. The columns names from (a) to (g) denote the ground-truth emotion of the images.

Conclusion

We have presented a novel method to exploit context information more efficiently by using the proposed globallocal attention model. We have shown that our approach can noticeably improve the emotion classification accuracy compared to the current state-of-the-art results in the context-aware emotion recognition task. The results on the context-aware emotion recognition datasets consistently demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our method.

References

[1] Chorowski, J., Bahdanau, D., Serdyuk, D., Cho, K., Bengio, Y.: Attention-based models for speech recognition. In NIPS, 2015.

[2] Lee, J., Kim, S., Kim, S., Park, J., Sohn, K.: Context-aware emotion recognition networks. In ICCV, 2019.

Global-Local Attention for Context-aware Emotion Recognition (Part 1)

Automatic emotion recognition has been a longstanding problem in both academia and industry. It enables a wide range of applications in various domains, ranging from healthcare, surveillance to robotics and human-computer interaction. Recently, significant progress has been made in the field and many methods have demonstrated promising results. However, recent works mainly focus on facial regions while ignoring the surrounding context, which is shown to play an important role in the understanding of the perceived emotion, especially when the emotions on the face are ambiguous or weakly expressed (see the examples in Figure 1).

Figure 1. Facial expression information is not always sufficient to infer people's emotions, especially when facial regions can not be seen clearly or are occluded.

We hypothesize that the local information (i.e., facial region) and global information (i.e., context background) have a correlative relationship, and by simultaneously learning the attention using both of them, the accuracy of the network can be improved. This is based on the fact that the emotion of one person can be indicated by not only the face’s emotion (i.e., local information) but also other context information such as the gesture, pose, or emotion/pose of a nearby person. To that end, we propose a new deep network, namely, Global-Local Attention for Emotion Recognition Network (GLAMOR-Net), to effectively recognize human emotions using a novel global-local attention mechanism. Our network is designed to extract features from both facial and context regions independently, then learn them together using the attention module. In this way, both the facial and contextual information is used altogether to infer human emotions.

Overview

Figure 2. The architecture of our proposed network. The whole process includes three steps. We extract the facial information (local) and context information (global) using two Encoding Modules. We then perform attention inference on the global context using the Global-Local Attention mechanism. Lastly, we fuse both features to determine the emotion.
Figure 2 shows an overview of our method. Specifically, we assume that emotions can be recognized by understanding the context components of the scene together with the facial expression. Our method aims to do emotion recognition in the wild by incorporating both facial information of the person’s face and contextual information surrounding that person. Our model consists of three components: Encoding Module, Global-Local Attention (GLA) Module, and Fusion Module. Our key design is the novel GLA module, which utilizes facial features as the local information to attend better to salient locations in the global context.

Face and Context Encoding

Our Encoding Module comprises the Facial Encoding Module to learn the face-specific features, and the Context Encoding Module to learn the context-specific features. Specifically, both the Face Encoding and Context Enconding Module are built on several convolutional layers to extract meaningful features from the corresponding input. Each module is comprised of five convolutional layers followed by a Batch Normalization layer an ReLU activation function. The number of filters starts with 32 in the first layer, increasing by a factor of 2 at each subsequent layer except the last one. Our network ends up with 256-channel feature map, which is the embedded representation with respect to the input image. In practice, we also mask the facial regions in the raw input to prevent the attention module from only focusing on the facial region while omitting the context information in other parts of the image.

Global-Local Attention

Inspired by the attention mechanism [1], to model the associative relationship of the local information (i.e., the facial region in our work) and global information (i.e., the surrounding context background), we propose the Global-Local Attention Module to guide the network focus on meaningful regions (Figure 3). In particular, our attention mechanism models the hidden correlation between the face and different regions in the context by capturing their similarity.

Figure 3. The proposed Global-Local Attention module takes the extracted face feature vector and the context feature map as the input to perform context attention inference.

We first reduce the facial feature map Ff\mathbf{F}_f into vector representation using the Global Pooling operator, denoted as vf\mathbf{v}_f. The context feature map can be viewed as a set of Wc×HcW_c \times H_c vectors with DcD_c dimensions, each vector in each cell (i,j)(i,j) represents the embedded features at that location with the corresponding patch in the input image. Therefore, at each region (i,j)(i,j) in the context feature map, we have Fc(i,j)=vi,j\mathbf{F}_c^{(i,j)} = \mathbf{v}_{i,j}.

We then concatenate [vf;vi,j][\mathbf{v}_f; \mathbf{v}_{i,j}] into a holistic vector vˉi,j\bar{\mathbf{v}}_{i,j}, which contains both information about the face and some small regions of the scene. We then employ a feed-forward neural network to compute the score corresponding to that region by feeding vˉi,j\bar{\mathbf{v}}_{i,j} into the network. By applying the same process for all regions, each region (i,j)(i,j) will output a raw score value si,js_{i,j}, we spatially apply the Softmax function to produce the attention map ai,j=Softmax(si,j)a_{i,j} = \text{Softmax}(s_{i,j}). To obtain the final context representation vector, we squish the feature maps by taking the average over all the regions weighted by ai,ja_{i,j} as follow:

vc=ΣiΣj(ai,jvi,j)\mathbf{v}_c = \Sigma_i\Sigma_j(a_{i,j} \odot \mathbf{v}_{i,j})

where vcRDc\mathbf{v}_c \in \mathbb{R}^{D_c} is the final single vector encoding the context information Intuively, vc\mathbf{v}_c mainly contains information from regions that have high attention, while other nonessential parts of the context are mostly ignored. With this design, our attention module can guide the network focus on important areas based on both facial information and context information of the image.

Face and Context Fusion

Figure 4. Detailed illustration of the Adaptive Fusion.

The Fusion Module takes the face vf\mathbf{v}_f and the context reprsentation vc\mathbf{v}_c as inputs, then the face score and context score are produced separately by two neural networks:

sf=F(vf;ϕf),sc=F(vc;ϕc)s_f = \mathcal{F}(\mathbf{v}_f; \phi_f), \quad\quad s_c = \mathcal{F}(\mathbf{v}_c; \phi_c)

where ϕf\phi_f and ϕc\phi_c are the network parameters of the face branch and context branch, respectively. Next, we normalize these scores by the Softmax function to produce weights for each face and context branch

wf=exp(sf)exp(sf)+exp(sc),wc=exp(sc)exp(sf)+exp(sc)w_f = \frac{\exp(s_f)}{\exp(s_f)+\exp(s_c)}, \quad w_c = \frac{\exp(s_c)}{\exp(s_f)+\exp(s_c)}

In this way, we let the two networks competitively determine which branch is more useful than the other. Then we amplify the more useful branch and lower the effect of the other by multiplying the extracted features with the corresponding weight:

vfvfwf,vcvcwc\mathbf{v}_f \leftarrow \mathbf{v}_f \odot w_f , \quad\quad \mathbf{v}_c \leftarrow \mathbf{v}_c \odot w_c

Finally, we use these vectors to estimate the emotion category. Specifically, in our experiments, after multiplying both vf\mathbf{v}_f and vc\mathbf{v}_c by their corresponding weights, we concatenate them together as the input for a network to make final predictions. Figure 4 shows our fusion procedure in detail.

References

[1] Chorowski, J., Bahdanau, D., Serdyuk, D., Cho, K., Bengio, Y.: Attention-based models for speech recognition. In NIPS, 2015.

[2] Lee, J., Kim, S., Kim, S., Park, J., Sohn, K.: Context-aware emotion recognition networks. In ICCV, 2019.