mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

AffectNet: A Database for Facial Expression, Valence, and Arousal Computing in the Wild

arXiv 1708.03985 ↗First posted 14 Aug 2017cs.CVcited by 490

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Abstract (arXiv)

Automated affective computing in the wild setting is a challenging problem in computer vision. Existing annotated databases of facial expressions in the wild are small and mostly cover discrete emotions (aka the categorical model). There are very limited annotated facial databases for affective computing in the continuous dimensional model (e.g., valence and arousal). To meet this need, we collected, annotated, and prepared for public distribution a new database of facial emotions in the wild (called AffectNet). AffectNet contains more than 1,000,000 facial images from the Internet by querying three major search engines using 1250 emotion related keywords in six different languages. About half of the retrieved images were manually annotated for the presence of seven discrete facial expressions and the intensity of valence and arousal. AffectNet is by far the largest database of facial expression, valence, and arousal in the wild enabling research in automated facial expression recognition in two different emotion models. Two baseline deep neural networks are used to classify images in the categorical model and predict the intensity of valence and arousal. Various evaluation metrics show that our deep neural network baselines can perform better than conventional machine learning methods and off-the-shelf facial expression recognition systems.

Key facts. Cited by 490 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 14 Aug 2017.

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2021: 70; 2022: 81; 2023: 87; 2024: 99; 2025: 89; 2026: 64.

490 papers.

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  1. 2022EMOCA: Emotion Driven Monocular Face Capture and Animationcited by 254
  2. 2023Motion-X: A Large-scale 3D Expressive Whole-body Human Motion Datasetcited by 220
  3. 2021Affect Analysis in-the-wild: Valence-Arousal, Expressions, Action Units and a Unified Frameworkcited by 174
  4. 2021Distribution Matching for Heterogeneous Multi-Task Learning: a Large-scale Face Studycited by 168
  5. 2023CelebV-Text: A Large-Scale Facial Text-Video Datasetcited by 103
  6. 2023Emotional Speech-Driven Animation with Content-Emotion Disentanglementcited by 98
  7. 2022Progressive Disentangled Representation Learning for Fine-Grained Controllable Talking Head Synthesiscited by 93
  8. 2021Dive into Ambiguity: Latent Distribution Mining and Pairwise Uncertainty Estimation for Facial Expression Recognitioncited by 89
  9. 2021TransFER: Learning Relation-aware Facial Expression Representations with Transformerscited by 85
  10. 2023Efficient Emotional Adaptation for Audio-Driven Talking-Head Generationcited by 81
  11. 2024SMIRK: 3D Facial Expressions through Analysis-by-Neural-Synthesiscited by 81
  12. 2022FERV39k: A Large-Scale Multi-Scene Dataset for Facial Expression Recognition in Videoscited by 69
38 more
  1. 2022Learn From All: Erasing Attention Consistency for Noisy Label Facial Expression Recognitioncited by 67
  2. 2024Distribution Matching for Multi-Task Learning of Classification Tasks: a Large-Scale Study on Faces & Beyondcited by 60
  3. 2021Understanding and Mitigating Annotation Bias in Facial Expression Recognitioncited by 50
  4. 2022M3ED: Multi-modal Multi-scene Multi-label Emotional Dialogue Databasecited by 50
  5. 2021Facial Expression Recognition with Visual Transformers and Attentional Selective Fusioncited by 49
  6. 2022Transformer-based Multimodal Information Fusion for Facial Expression Analysiscited by 49
  7. 2022POSTER: A Pyramid Cross-Fusion Transformer Network for Facial Expression Recognitioncited by 49
  8. 2025AffectGPT: A New Dataset, Model, and Benchmark for Emotion Understanding with Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 43
  9. 2021Facial expression and attributes recognition based on multi-task learning of lightweight neural networkscited by 40
  10. 2023From Static to Dynamic: Adapting Landmark-Aware Image Models for Facial Expression Recognition in Videoscited by 39
  11. 2023SwinFace: A Multi-task Transformer for Face Recognition, Expression Recognition, Age Estimation and Attribute Estimationcited by 38
  12. 2023GPT-4V with Emotion: A Zero-shot Benchmark for Generalized Emotion Recognitioncited by 38
  13. 2023High-fidelity Generalized Emotional Talking Face Generation with Multi-modal Emotion Space Learningcited by 37
  14. 2022Vision Transformer with Attentive Pooling for Robust Facial Expression Recognitioncited by 35
  15. 2024FaceXFormer: A Unified Transformer for Facial Analysiscited by 34
  16. 2021Py-Feat: Python Facial Expression Analysis Toolboxcited by 33
  17. 2022A Joint Cross-Attention Model for Audio-Visual Fusion in Dimensional Emotion Recognitioncited by 33
  18. 2022Towards Semi-Supervised Deep Facial Expression Recognition with An Adaptive Confidence Margincited by 32
  19. 2022MixAugment & Mixup: Augmentation Methods for Facial Expression Recognitioncited by 31
  20. 2021Leveraging Recent Advances in Deep Learning for Audio-Visual Emotion Recognitioncited by 30
  21. 2022Uncertainty-aware Label Distribution Learning for Facial Expression Recognitioncited by 30
  22. 2024FineCLIPER: Multi-modal Fine-grained CLIP for Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition with AdaptERscited by 30
  23. 2024AUFormer: Vision Transformers are Parameter-Efficient Facial Action Unit Detectorscited by 29
  24. 2021Multimodal Engagement Analysis from Facial Videos in the Classroomcited by 27
  25. 2021MVT: Mask Vision Transformer for Facial Expression Recognition in the wildcited by 27
  26. 2023CLIPER: A Unified Vision-Language Framework for In-the-Wild Facial Expression Recognitioncited by 27
  27. 2023LaughTalk: Expressive 3D Talking Head Generation with Laughtercited by 27
  28. 2024EMO-LLaMA: Enhancing Facial Emotion Understanding with Instruction Tuningcited by 27
  29. 2021Stimuli-Aware Visual Emotion Analysiscited by 26
  30. 2024Facial Affective Behavior Analysis with Instruction Tuningcited by 26
  31. 2021Pre-training strategies and datasets for facial representation learningcited by 25
  32. 2023POSTER++: A simpler and stronger facial expression recognition networkcited by 25
  33. 2023Multi-modal Facial Affective Analysis based on Masked Autoencodercited by 23
  34. 2025EmotiCrafter: Text-to-Emotional-Image Generation based on Valence-Arousal Modelcited by 23
  35. 2021Responsible AI: Gender bias assessment in emotion recognitioncited by 22
  36. 2022Self-attention fusion for audiovisual emotion recognition with incomplete datacited by 22
  37. 2022COLD Fusion: Calibrated and Ordinal Latent Distribution Fusion for Uncertainty-Aware Multimodal Emotion Recognitioncited by 22
  38. 2023HiFace: High-Fidelity 3D Face Reconstruction by Learning Static and Dynamic Detailscited by 22

50 most cited of 490 All 490 (JSON)