Abstract

The face is one of the most powerful channel of non-verbal communication. The most commonly used taxonomy to describe facial behaviour is the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). FACS segments the visible effects of facial muscle activation into 30+ action units (AUs). AUs, which may occur alone and in thousands of combinations, can de-scribe nearly all-possible facial expressions. Most existing methods for automatic AU detection treat the problem us-ing one-vs-all classifiers and fail to exploit dependencies among AU and facial features. We introduce joint-patch and multi-label learning (JPML) to address these issues. JPML leverages group sparsity by selecting a sparse subset of fa-cial patches while learning a multi-label classifier. In four of five comparisons on three diverse datasets, CK+, GFT, and BP4D, JPML produced the highest average F1 scores in comparison with state-of-the art. 1.