Video-based Emotion Recognition Using Deeply-Supervised Neural Networks

Emotion recognition (ER) based on natural facial images/videos has been studied for some years and considered a comparatively hot topic in the field of affective computing. However, it remains a challenge to perform ER in the wild, given the noises generated from head pose, face deformation, and illumination variation. To address this challenge, motivated by recent progress in Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), we develop a novel deeply supervised CNN (DSN) architecture, taking the multi-level and multi-scale features extracted from different convolutional layers to provide a more advanced representation of ER. By embedding a series of side-output layers, our DSN model provides class-wise supervision and integrates predictions from multiple layers. Finally, our team ranked 3rd at the EmotiW 2018 challenge with our model achieving an accuracy of 61.1%.