Multi-Scale Dynamic and Hierarchical Relationship Modeling for Facial Action Units Recognition

Abstract

Human facial action units (AUs) are mutually related in a hierarchical manner, as not only they are associated with each other in both spatial and temporal domains but also AUs located in the same/close facial regions show stronger relationships than those of different facial regions. While none of existing approach thoroughly model such hi-erarchical inter-dependencies among AUs, this paper proposes to comprehensively model multi-scale AU-related dynamic and hierarchical spatiotemporal relationship among AUs for their occurrences recognition. Specifically, we first propose a novel multi-scale temporal differencing network with an adaptive weighting block to explicitly capture facial dynamics across frames at different spatial scales, which specifically considers the heterogeneity of range and mag-nitude in different AUs' activation. Then, a two-stage strategy is introduced to hierarchically model the relationship among AUs based on their spatial distribution (i.e., local and cross-region AU relationship modelling). Experimental results achieved on BP4D and DISFA show that our approach is the new state-of-the-art in the field of AU occurrence recognition. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/CVI-SZU/MDHR.