Depression Detection with Dynamic and Static Visual Features

Depression is a serious mood disorder that can significantly impact a person’s ability to live a normal life. In severe cases, it can even lead to suicidal thoughts. As such, accurate detection of depression is crucial for effective management and treatment. This paper presents a facial expression-based approach for depression detection, which is composed of two steps. First, static features are extracted using Local Binary Pattern (LBP), Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG), and Bag of Words (BOW). Second, dynamic features are obtained by applying LBPs on Three Orthogonal Planes (LBP-TOP) and Eight Vertices LBP (EVLBP) frame by frame. Next, the static and dynamic features are combined to create a 1377-dimensional vector for each video. Finally, Gradient Boosting Regression is used to predict depression scores. The experimental results on the AVEC 2014 depression dataset ([Formula: see text], [Formula: see text]) demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. These results indicate that the low-dimensional vectors extracted by the proposed method can effectively capture the facial motion of individuals with depression, and also suggest that hand-crafted methods could have potential in depression detection.