The motion in emotion - A CERT based approach to the FERA emotion challenge

This paper assesses the performance of measures of facial expression dynamics derived from the Computer Expression Recognition Toolbox (CERT) for classifying emotions in the Facial Expression Recognition and Analysis (FERA) Challenge. The CERT system automatically estimates facial action intensity and head position using learned appearance-based models on single frames of video. CERT outputs were used to derive a representation of the intensity and motion in each video, consisting of the extremes of displacement, velocity and acceleration. Using this representation, emotion detectors were trained on the FERA training examples. Experiments on the released portion of the FERA dataset are presented, as well as results on the blind test. No consideration of subject identity was taken into account in the blind test. The F1 scores were well above the baseline criterion for success.