Pairwise Conditional Random Forests for Facial Expression Recognition

Facial expression can be seen as the dynamic variation of one's appearance over time. Successful recognition thus involves finding representations of high-dimensional spatio-temporal patterns that can be generalized to unseen facial morphologies and variations of the expression dynamics. In this paper, we propose to learn Random Forests from heterogeneous derivative features (e.g. facial fiducial point movements or texture variations) upon pairs of images. Those forests are conditioned on the expression label of the first frame to reduce the variability of the ongoing expression transitions. When testing on a specific frame of a video, pairs are created between this current frame and the previous ones. Predictions for each previous frame are used to draw trees from Pairwise Conditional Random Forests (PCRF) whose pairwise outputs are averaged over time to produce robust estimates. As such, PCRF appears as a natural extension of Random Forests to learn spatio-temporal patterns, that leads to significant improvements over standard Random Forests as well as state-of-the-art approaches on several facial expression benchmarks.