Facial Action Unit Representation based on Self-supervised Learning with Ensembled Priori Constraints

Facial action units (AUs) focus on a comprehensive set of atomic facial muscle movements for human expression understanding. Based on supervised learning, discriminative AU representation can be achieved from local patches where the AUs are located. Unfortunately, accurate AU localization and characterization are challenged by the tremendous manual annotations, which limits the performance of AU recognition in realistic scenarios. In this study, we propose an end-to-end self-supervised AU representation learning model (SsupAU) to learn AU representations from unlabeled facial videos. Specifically, the input face is decomposed into six components using auto-encoders: five photo-geometric meaningful components, together with 2D flow field AUs. By constructing the canonical neutral face, posed neutral face, and posed expressional face gradually, these components can be disentangled without supervision, therefore the AU representations can be learned. To construct the canonical neutral face without manually labeled ground truth of emotion state or AU intensity, two priori knowledge based assumptions are proposed: 1) identity consistency, which explores the identical albedos and depths of different frames in a face video, and helps to learn the camera color mode as an extra cue for canonical neutral face recovery. 2) average face, which enables the model to discover a 'neutral facial expression' of the canonical neutral face and decouple the AUs in representation learning. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to design self-supervised AU representation learning method based on the definition of AUs. Substantial experiments on benchmark datasets have demonstrated the superior performance of the proposed work in comparison to other state-of-the-art approaches, as well as an outstanding capability of decomposing input face into meaningful factors for its reconstruction. The code is made available at https://github.com/Sunner4nwpu/SsupAU.