UCL Discovery
UCL home » Library Services » Electronic resources » UCL Discovery

A performance comparison of eight commercially available automatic classifiers for facial affect recognition

Dupré, D; Krumhuber, EG; Küster, D; McKeown, GJ; (2020) A performance comparison of eight commercially available automatic classifiers for facial affect recognition. PLOS ONE , 15 (4) , Article e0231968. 10.1371/journal.pone.0231968. Green open access

[thumbnail of Damien_paper.pdf]
Preview
Text
Damien_paper.pdf - Published Version

Download (1MB) | Preview

Abstract

In the wake of rapid advances in automatic affect analysis, commercial automatic classifiers for facial affect recognition have attracted considerable attention in recent years. While several options now exist to analyze dynamic video data, less is known about the relative performance of these classifiers, in particular when facial expressions are spontaneous rather than posed. In the present work, we tested eight out-of-the-box automatic classifiers, and compared their emotion recognition performance to that of human observers. A total of 937 videos were sampled from two large databases that conveyed the basic six emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust) either in posed (BU-4DFE) or spontaneous (UT-Dallas) form. Results revealed a recognition advantage for human observers over automatic classification. Among the eight classifiers, there was considerable variance in recognition accuracy ranging from 48% to 62%. Subsequent analyses per type of expression revealed that performance by the two best performing classifiers approximated those of human observers, suggesting high agreement for posed expressions. However, classification accuracy was consistently lower (although above chance level) for spontaneous affective behavior. The findings indicate potential shortcomings of existing out-of-the-box classifiers for measuring emotions, and highlight the need for more spontaneous facial databases that can act as a benchmark in the training and testing of automatic emotion recognition systems. We further discuss some limitations of analyzing facial expressions that have been recorded in controlled environments.

Type: Article
Title: A performance comparison of eight commercially available automatic classifiers for facial affect recognition
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0231968
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0231968
Language: English
Additional information: Copyright © 2020 Dupré et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Keywords: Emotions, Face, Face recognition, Behavior, Fear, Happiness, Human performance, Sequence databases
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Experimental Psychology
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10096892
Downloads since deposit
37Downloads
Download activity - last month
Download activity - last 12 months
Downloads by country - last 12 months

Archive Staff Only

View Item View Item