Fusing Aligned and Non-Aligned Face Information for Automatic Affect Recognition in the Wild: A Deep Learning Approach

Face alignment can fail in real-world conditions, negatively impacting the performance of automatic facial expression recognition (FER) systems. In this study, we assume a realistic situation including non-alignable faces due to failures in facial landmark detection. Our proposed approach fuses information about non-aligned and aligned facial states, in order to boost FER accuracy and efficiency. Six experimental scenarios using discriminative deep convolutional neural networks (DCNs) are compared, and causes for performance differences are identified. To handle non-alignable faces better, we further introduce DCNs that learn a mapping from non-aligned facial states to aligned ones, alignment-mapping networks (AMNs). We show that AMNs represent geometric transformations of face alignment, providing features beneficial for FER. Our automatic system based on ensembles of the discriminative DCNs and the AMNs achieves impressive results on a challenging database for FER in the wild.