Spontaneous facial expression recognition: A robust metric learning approach

•A novel spontaneous expression recognition is proposed.•It utilizes multiple annotators for expression labeling.•Robustness to annotation errors is ensured via estimation of error probability.•Expectation Maximization is used for learning the distance metric.•A high recognition accuracy is achieved via the robust metric learning.

Spontaneous facial expression recognition is significantly more challenging than recognizing posed ones. We focus on two issues that are still under-addressed in this area. First, due to the inherent subtlety, the geometric and appearance features of spontaneous expressions tend to overlap with each other, making it hard for classifiers to find effective separation boundaries. Second, the training set usually contains dubious class labels which can hurt the recognition performance if no countermeasure is taken. In this paper, we propose a spontaneous expression recognition method based on robust metric learning with the aim of alleviating these two problems. In particular, to increase the discrimination of different facial expressions, we learn a new metric space in which spatially close data points have a higher probability of being in the same class. In addition, instead of using the noisy labels directly for metric learning, we define sensitivity and specificity to characterize the annotation reliability of each annotator. Then the distance metric and annotators' reliability is jointly estimated by maximizing the likelihood of the observed class labels. With the introduction of latent variables representing the true class labels, the distance metric and annotators' reliability can be iteratively solved under the Expectation Maximization framework. Comparative experiments show that our method achieves better recognition accuracy on spontaneous expression recognition, and the learned metric can be reliably transferred to recognize posed expressions.