Knowledge-Driven Self-Supervised Representation Learning for Facial Action Unit Recognition

Facial action unit (AU) recognition is formulated as a supervised learning problem by recent works. However, the complex labeling process makes it challenging to provide AU annotations for large amounts of facial images. To remedy this, we utilize AU labeling rules defined by the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) to design a novel knowledge-driven self-supervised representation learning framework for AU recognition. The representation encoder is trained using large amounts of facial images without AU annotations. AU labeling rules are summarized from FACS to design facial partition manners and determine correlations between facial regions. The method utilizes a backbone network to extract local facial area representations and a project head to map the representations into a low-dimensional latent space. In the latent space, a contrastive learning component leverages the inter-area difference to learn AU-related local representations while maintaining intra-area instance discrimination. Correlations between facial regions summarized from AU labeling rules are also explored to further learn representations using a predicting learning component. Evaluation on two benchmark databases demonstrates that the learned representation is powerful and data-efficient for AU recognition.