ABAW: Valence-Arousal Estimation, Expression Recognition, Action Unit Detection & Emotional Reaction Intensity Estimation Challenges

TL;DR

The 5th ABAW Competition challenges participants to analyze affective behaviors in-the-wild through four tasks using extensive audiovisual datasets, advancing automatic emotion recognition research.

Contribution

This paper introduces new affective behavior analysis challenges with large annotated datasets, evaluation metrics, and baseline systems for valence-arousal, expression, action units, and emotional reactions.

Findings

Baseline systems established for each challenge.

Datasets include Aff-Wild2 and Hume-Reaction with extensive annotations.

Evaluation metrics outlined for fair comparison.

Abstract

The fifth Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) Competition is part of the respective ABAW Workshop which will be held in conjunction with IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR), 2023. The 5th ABAW Competition is a continuation of the Competitions held at ECCV 2022, IEEE CVPR 2022, ICCV 2021, IEEE FG 2020 and CVPR 2017 Conferences, and is dedicated at automatically analyzing affect. For this year's Competition, we feature two corpora: i) an extended version of the Aff-Wild2 database and ii) the Hume-Reaction dataset. The former database is an audiovisual one of around 600 videos of around 3M frames and is annotated with respect to:a) two continuous affect dimensions -valence (how positive/negative a person is) and arousal (how active/passive a person is)-; b) basic expressions (e.g. happiness, sadness, neutral state); and c) atomic facial muscle actions (i.e., action units). The latter dataset is an audiovisual one in which reactions of individuals to emotional stimuli have been annotated with respect to seven emotional expression intensities. Thus the 5th ABAW Competition encompasses four Challenges: i) uni-task Valence-Arousal Estimation, ii) uni-task Expression Classification, iii) uni-task Action Unit Detection, and iv) Emotional Reaction Intensity Estimation. In this paper, we present these Challenges, along with their corpora, we outline the evaluation metrics, we present the baseline systems and illustrate their obtained performance.