Label Distribution Learning on Auxiliary Label Space Graphs for Facial Expression Recognition

Many existing studies reveal that annotation inconsistency widely exists among a variety of facial expression recognition (FER) datasets. The reason might be the subjectivity of human annotators and the ambiguous nature of the expression labels. One promising strategy tackling such a problem is a recently proposed learning paradigm called Label Distribution Learning (LDL), which allows multiple labels with different intensity to be linked to one expression. However, it is often impractical to directly apply label distribution learning because numerous existing datasets only contain one-hot labels rather than label distributions. To solve the problem, we propose a novel approach named Label Distribution Learning on Auxiliary Label Space Graphs(LDL-ALSG) that leverages the topological information of the labels from related but more distinct tasks, such as action unit recognition and facial landmark detection. The underlying assumption is that facial images should have similar expression distributions to their neighbours in the label space of action unit recognition and facial landmark detection. Our proposed method is evaluated on a variety of datasets and outperforms those state-of-the-art methods consistently with a huge margin.