Co-Completion for Occluded Facial Expression Recognition

The existence of occlusions brings in semantically irrelevant visual patterns and leads to the content loss of occluded regions. Although previous works have made improvement on occluded facial expression recognition, they do not explicitly handle the interference factors aforementioned. In this paper, we propose an intuitive and simplified workflow, Co-Completion, which combines occlusion discarding and feature completion together to reduce the impact of occlusions on facial expression recognition. To protect key features from being contaminated and reduce the dependency of feature completion on occlusion discarding, guidance from discriminative regions is also introduced for joint feature completion. Moreover, we release the COO-RW database for occlusion simulation and refine the occlusion generation protocol for fair comparison in this filed. Experiments on synthetic and realistic databases demonstrate the superiority of our method. The COO-RW database can be downloaded from https://github.com/loveSmallOrange/COO-RW.