Two-level Attention with Two-stage Multi-task Learning for Facial Emotion Recognition

Compared with facial emotion recognition on categorical model, the dimensional emotion recognition can describe numerous emotions of the real world more accurately. Most prior works of dimensional emotion estimation only considered laboratory data and used video, speech or other multi-modal features. The effect of these methods applied on static images in the real world is unknown. In this paper, a two-level attention with two-stage multi-task learning (2Att-2Mt) framework is proposed for facial emotion estimation on only static images. Firstly, the features of corresponding region(position-level features) are extracted and enhanced automatically by first-level attention mechanism. In the following, we utilize Bi-directional Recurrent Neural Network(Bi-RNN) with self-attention(second-level attention) to make full use of the relationship features of different layers(layer-level features) adaptively. Owing to the inherent complexity of dimensional emotion recognition, we propose a two-stage multi-task learning structure to exploited categorical representations to ameliorate the dimensional representations and estimate valence and arousal simultaneously in view of the correlation of the two targets. The quantitative results conducted on AffectNet dataset show significant advancement on Concordance Correlation Coefficient(CCC) and Root Mean Square Error(RMSE), illustrating the superiority of the proposed framework. Besides, extensive comparative experiments have also fully demonstrated the effectiveness of different components.