Pose-aware Adversarial Domain Adaptation for Personalized Facial Expression Recognition

Abstract: Current facial expression recognition methods fail to simultaneously cope with pose and subject variations. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised adversarial domain adaptation method which can alleviate both variations at the same time. Specially, our method consists of three learning strategies: adversarial domain adaptation learning, cross adversarial feature learning, and reconstruction learning. The first aims to learn pose- and expression-related feature representations in the source domain and adapt both feature distributions to that of the target domain by imposing adversarial learning. By using personalized adversarial domain adaptation, this learning strategy can alleviate subject variations and exploit information from the source domain to help learning in the target domain. The second serves to perform feature disentanglement between pose- and expression-related feature representations by impulsing pose-related feature representations expression-undistinguished and the expression-related feature representations pose-undistinguished. The last can further boost feature learning by applying face image reconstructions so that the learned expression-related feature representations are more pose- and identity-robust. Experimental results on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.