The first facial expression recognition and analysis challenge
Open accessAbstract
Automatic Facial Expression Recognition and Analysis, in particular FACS Action Unit (AU) detection and discrete emotion detection, has been an active topic in computer science for over two decades. Standardisation and comparability has come some way; for instance, there exist a number of commonly used facial expression databases. However, lack of a common evaluation protocol and lack of sufficient details to reproduce the reported individual results make it difficult to compare systems to each other. This in turn hinders the progress of the field. A periodical challenge in Facial Expression Recognition and Analysis would allow this comparison in a fair manner. It would clarify how far the field has come, and would allow us to identify new goals, challenges and targets. In this paper we present the first challenge in automatic recognition of facial expressions to be held during the IEEE conference on Face and Gesture Recognition 2011, in Santa Barbara, California. Two sub-challenges are defined: one on AU detection and another on discrete emotion detection. It outlines the evaluation protocol, the data used, and the results of a baseline method for the two sub-challenges.
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- Authors
- Valstar, M. F., Jiang, B., Mehu, M., Pantic, M., & Scherer, K.
- Affiliations
- Imperial College London (GB)
- University of Genoa (IT)
- Venue
- Face and Gesture 2011
- Publisher
- IEEE
- Published
- 2011-03
- Pages
- 921-926
- ISSN
- 1541-5058 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2129106196
- Cited by
- 385
- References
- 18
- Citations by year
- 2026: 3 · 2025: 7 · 2024: 12 · 2023: 25 · 2022: 14 · 2021: 20 · 2020: 25 · 2019: 25 · 2018: 28 · 2017: 33 · 2016: 50 · 2015: 36 · 2014: 33 · 2013: 36 · 2012: 18
- FWCI
- 54.41
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- Licence
- other-oa
- Locations
- International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (publishedVersion)
- University of Twente Research Information (publishedVersion)
- Archive ouverte UNIGE (University of Geneva) (publishedVersion, other-oa)
- Archive ouverte UNIGE (University of Geneva) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- University of Twente Research Information (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/H016988/1)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Emotion and Mood Recognition
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Face recognition and analysis
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Face and Expression Recognition
- Keywords
- facial expression recognition, facial expression analysis, benchmark challenge, evaluation protocol, facial expression database, reproducibility, baseline method
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