Action Units Recognition Using Improved Pairwise Deep Architecture

Facial Action Units (AUs) represent a set of facial muscular activities and various combinations of AUs can represent a wide range of emotions. AU recognition is often used in many applications, including marketing, healthcare, education, and so forth. Although a lot of studies have developed various methods to improve recognition accuracy, it still remains a major challenge for AU recognition. In the Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) 2020 competition, we proposed a new automatic Action Units (AUs) recognition method using a pairwise deep architecture to derive the Pseudo-Intensities of each AU and then convert them into predicted intensities. This year, we introduced a new technique to last year's framework to further reduce AU recognition errors due to temporary face occlusion such as temporary face occlusion such as face hiding or large face orientation. We obtained a score of 0.65 in the validation data set for this year's competition.