# FERV39k: A Large-Scale Multi-Scene Dataset for Facial Expression Recognition in Videos

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.09463 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09463/

## Key facts

- Cited by 69 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [The Kinetics Human Action Video Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06950/) (2017)
- [A Closer Look at Spatiotemporal Convolutions for Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11248/) (2017)
- [MS-Celeb-1M: A Dataset and Benchmark for Large-Scale Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08221/) (2016)
- [AffectNet: A Database for Facial Expression, Valence, and Arousal Computing in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.03985/) (2017)
- [Long-term Recurrent Convolutional Networks for Visual Recognition and Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4389/) (2014)
- [Learning Spatio-Temporal Representation with Pseudo-3D Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10305/) (2017)
- [Deep Facial Expression Recognition: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08348/) (2018)
- [FineGym: A Hierarchical Video Dataset for Fine-grained Action Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06704/) (2020)
- [Beyond Short Snippets: Deep Networks for Video Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.08909/) (2015)
- [Deep Affect Prediction in-the-wild: Aff-Wild Database and Challenge, Deep Architectures, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.10938/) (2018)
- [DFEW: A Large-Scale Database for Recognizing Dynamic Facial Expressions in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05924/) (2020)
- [Region Attention Networks for Pose and Occlusion Robust Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04075/) (2019)
- [Context-Aware Emotion Recognition Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05913/) (2019)
- [SMART Frame Selection for Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.10671/) (2020)
- [FrameExit: Conditional Early Exiting for Efficient Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13400/) (2021)
- [A Systematic Review on Affective Computing: Emotion Models, Databases, and Recent Advances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06935/) (2022)
- [Frame attention networks for facial expression recognition in videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00193/) (2019)
- [Video-based Facial Micro-Expression Analysis: A Survey of Datasets, Features and Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12728/) (2022)
- [Deep Analysis of CNN-based Spatio-temporal Representations for Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11757/) (2020)
- [Dynamic Sampling Networks for Efficient Action Recognition in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.15560/) (2020)
- [No frame left behind: Full Video Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15395/) (2021)
- [Peak-Piloted Deep Network for Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06997/) (2016)
- [MER-GCN: Micro Expression Recognition Based on Relation Modeling with Graph Convolutional Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08915/) (2020)
- [Dynamic Facial Expression Generation on Hilbert Hypersphere with Conditional Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10087/) (2019)
- [EmotiW 2018: Audio-Video, Student Engagement and Group-Level Affect Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.07773/) (2018)
- [Semantic Neighborhood-Aware Deep Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12725/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 69)

- [HumanOmni: A Large Vision-Speech Language Model for Human-Centric Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15111/) (2025)
- [Prompting Visual-Language Models for Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13382/) (2023)
- [AffectGPT: A New Dataset, Model, and Benchmark for Emotion Understanding with Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.16566/) (2025)
- [MAE-DFER: Efficient Masked Autoencoder for Self-supervised Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02227/) (2023)
- [Intensity-Aware Loss for Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10335/) (2022)
- [From Static to Dynamic: Adapting Landmark-Aware Image Models for Facial Expression Recognition in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05447/) (2023)
- [GPT-4V with Emotion: A Zero-shot Benchmark for Generalized Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04293/) (2023)
- [EmoCLIP: A Vision-Language Method for Zero-Shot Video Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16640/) (2023)
- [HiCMAE: Hierarchical Contrastive Masked Autoencoder for Self-Supervised Audio-Visual Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05698/) (2024)
- [FineCLIPER: Multi-modal Fine-grained CLIP for Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition with AdaptERs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02157/) (2024)
- [CLIPER: A Unified Vision-Language Framework for In-the-Wild Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00193/) (2023)
- [EMO-LLaMA: Enhancing Facial Emotion Understanding with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11424/) (2024)
- [Facial Affective Behavior Analysis with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05052/) (2024)
- [HTNet for micro-expression recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14637/) (2023)
- [Learning from Heterogeneity: Generalizing Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition via Distributionally Robust Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15765/) (2025)
- [SVFAP: Self-supervised Video Facial Affect Perceiver](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00416/) (2023)
- [Enhancing Zero-Shot Facial Expression Recognition by LLM Knowledge Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19100/) (2024)
- [LOGO-Former: Local-Global Spatio-Temporal Transformer for Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03343/) (2023)
- [A3lign-DFER: Pioneering Comprehensive Dynamic Affective Alignment for Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition with CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04294/) (2024)
- [Nonverbal Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08133/) (2024)
- [Unlocking the Emotional World of Visual Media: An Overview of the Science, Research, and Impact of Understanding Emotion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13463/) (2023)
- [Face-LLaVA: Facial Expression and Attribute Understanding through Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07198/) (2025)
- [Static for Dynamic: Towards a Deeper Understanding of Dynamic Facial Expressions Using Static Expression Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06154/) (2024)
- [FaVChat: Hierarchical Prompt-Query Guided Facial Video Understanding with Data-Efficient GRPO](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09158/) (2025)
- [Text-to-Image Cross-Modal Generation: A Systematic Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11631/) (2024)
- [All rivers run into the sea: Unified Modality Brain-like Emotional Central Mechanism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15590/) (2024)
- [Facial Expression Analysis and Its Potentials in IoT Systems: A Contemporary Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17616/) (2024)
- [VAEmo: Efficient Representation Learning for Visual-Audio Emotion with Knowledge Injection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02331/) (2025)
- [OUS: Scene-Guided Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18769/) (2024)
- [FE-Adapter: Adapting Image-based Emotion Classifiers to Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02421/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Current benchmarks for facial expression recognition (FER) mainly focus on static images, while there are limited datasets for FER in videos. It is still ambiguous to evaluate whether performances of existing methods remain satisfactory in real-world application-oriented scenes. For example, the "Happy" expression with high intensity in Talk-Show is more discriminating than the same expression with low intensity in Official-Event. To fill this gap, we build a large-scale multi-scene dataset, coined as FERV39k. We analyze the important ingredients of constructing such a novel dataset in three aspects: (1) multi-scene hierarchy and expression class, (2) generation of candidate video clips, (3) trusted manual labelling process. Based on these guidelines, we select 4 scenarios subdivided into 22 scenes, annotate 86k samples automatically obtained from 4k videos based on the well-designed workflow, and finally build 38,935 video clips labeled with 7 classic expressions. Experiment benchmarks on four kinds of baseline frameworks were also provided and further analysis on their performance across different scenes and some challenges for future research were given. Besides, we systematically investigate key components of DFER by ablation studies. The baseline framework and our project will be available.