Learning Transferable Sparse Representations for Cross-Corpus Facial Expression Recognition

Abstract

An assumption widely used in traditional facial expression recognition algorithms is that the training and testing are conducted on the same dataset. However, this assumption does not hold in practice, in which the training data and testing data are often from different datasets. In this scenario, directly deploying these algorithms would lead to severe information loss and performance degradation due to the domain shift. To address this challenging problem, in this paper, we propose a novel transferable sparse subspace representation method (TSSR) for cross-corpus facial expression recognition. Specifically, in order to reduce the cross-corpus mismatch, inspired by sparse subspace clustering, we advocate reconstructing the source and target samples using the source data points based on L1-norm sparse representation. Each data point in source and target corpora can be ideally represented as a combination of a few other source points from its own subspace. Moreover, we take into account the local geometrical information within the cross-corpus data by adopting a graph Laplacian regularizer, which can efficiently preserve the local manifold structure and better transfer knowledge between two corpora. Finally, experimental results on several facial expression datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over some state-of-the-art methods.