Personalized Modeling of Facial Action Unit Intensity

Facial expressions depend greatly on facial morphology and expressiveness of the observed person. Recent studies have shown great improvement of the personalized over non-personalized models in variety of facial expression related tasks, such as face and emotion recognition. However, in the context of facial action unit (AU) intensity estimation, personalized modeling has been scarcely investigated. In this paper, we propose a two-step approach for personalized modeling of facial AU intensity from spontaneously displayed facial expressions. In the first step, we perform facial feature decomposition using the proposed matrix decomposition algorithm that separates the person’s identity from facial expression. These two are then jointly modeled using the framework of Conditional Ordinal Random Fields, resulting in a personalized model for intensity estimation of AUs. Our experimental results show that the proposed personalized model largely outperforms non-personalized models for intensity estimation of AUs.