Automated Depression Diagnosis Based on Deep Networks to Encode Facial Appearance and Dynamics

As a severe psychiatric disorder disease, depression is a state of low mood and aversion to activity, which prevents a person from functioning normally in both work and daily lives. The study on automated mental health assessment has been given increasing attentions in recent years. In this paper, we study the problem of automatic diagnosis of depression. A new approach to predict the Beck Depression Inventory II (BDI-II) values from video data is proposed based on the deep networks. The proposed framework is designed in a two stream manner, aiming at capturing both the facial appearance and dynamics. Further, we employ joint tuning layers that can implicitly integrate the appearance and dynamic information. Experiments are conducted on two depression databases, AVEC2013 and AVEC2014. The experimental results show that our proposed approach significantly improve the depression prediction performance, compared to other visual-based approaches.