Generating near-infrared facial expression datasets with dimensional affect labels

Abstract: Facial expression analysis has long been an active research area of computer vision. Traditional methods mainly analyse images for prototypical discrete emotions; as a result, they do not provide an accurate depiction of the complex emotional states in humans. Furthermore, illumination variance remains a challenge for face analysis in the visible light spectrum. To address these issues, we propose using a dimensional model based on valence and arousal to represent a wider range of emotions, in combination with near infra-red (NIR) imagery, which is more robust to illumination changes. Since there are no existing NIR facial expression datasets with valence-arousal labels available, we present two complementary data augmentation methods (face morphing and CycleGAN approach) to create NIR image datasets with dimensional emotion labels from existing categorical and/or visible-light datasets. Our experiments show that these generated NIR datasets are comparable to existing datasets in terms of data quality and baseline prediction performance.