Group happiness assessment using geometric features and dataset balancing

Abstract

This paper presents the techniques employed in our team's submissions to the 2016 Emotion Recognition in the Wild contest, for the sub-challenge of group-level emotion recognition. The objective of this sub-challenge is to estimate the happiness intensity of groups of people in consumer photos. We follow a predominately bottom-up approach, in which the individual happiness level of each face is estimated separately. The proposed technique is based on geometric features derived from 49 facial points. These features are used to train a model on a subset of the HAPPEI dataset, balanced across expression and headpose, using Partial Least Squares regression. The trained model exhibits competitive performance for a range of non-frontal poses, while at the same time offering a semantic interpretation of the facial distances that may contribute positively or negatively to group-level happiness. Various techniques are explored in combining these estimations in order to perform group-level prediction, including the distribution of expressions, significance of a face relative to the whole group, and mean estimation. Our best submission achieves an RMSE of 0.8316 on the competition test set, which compares favorably to the RMSE of 1.30 of the baseline.