# How Facial Features Convey Attention in Stationary Environments

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.14931 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14931/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Nov 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [A Realistic Dataset and Baseline Temporal Model for Early Drowsiness Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07312/) (2019)
- [A Gentle Tutorial of Recurrent Neural Network with Error Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02583/) (2016)
- [Automated Alertness and Emotion Detection for Empathic Feedback During E-Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.00312/) (2016)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Awareness detection technologies have been gaining traction in a variety of enterprises; most often used for driver fatigue detection, recent research has shifted towards using computer vision technologies to analyze user attention in environments such as online classrooms. This paper aims to extend previous research on distraction detection by analyzing which visual features contribute most to predicting awareness and fatigue. We utilized the open source facial analysis toolkit OpenFace in order to analyze visual data of subjects at varying levels of attentiveness. Then, using a Support-Vector Machine (SVM) we created several prediction models for user attention and identified Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) and Action Units to be the greatest predictors of the features we tested. We also compared the performance of this SVM to deep learning approaches that utilize Convolutional and/or Recurrent neural networks (CNN's and CRNN's). Interestingly, CRNN's did not appear to perform significantly better than their CNN counterparts. While deep learning methods achieved greater prediction accuracy, SVMs utilized less resources and, using certain parameters, were able to approach the performance of deep learning methods.