Expression Complementary Disentanglement Network for Facial Expression Recognition

Disentangling facial expressions from other disturbing facial attributes in face images is an essential topic for facial expression recognition. Previous methods only care about facial expression disentanglement (FED) itself, ignoring the negative effects of other facial attributes. Due to the annotations on limited facial attributes, it is difficult for existing FED solutions to disentangle all disturbance from the input face. To solve this issue, we propose an expression complementary disentanglement network (ECDNet). ECDNet proposes to finish the FED task during a face reconstruction process, so as to address all facial attributes during disentanglement. Different from traditional reconstruction models, ECDNet reconstructs face images by progressively generating and combining facial appearance and matching geometry. It designs the expression incentive (EIE) and expression inhibition (EIN) mechanisms, inducing the model to characterize the disentangled expression and complementary parts precisely. Facial geometry and appearance, generated in the reconstructed process, are dealt with to represent facial expressions and complementary parts, respectively. The combination of distinctive reconstruction model, EIE, and EIN mechanisms ensures the completeness and exactness of the FED task. Experimental results on RAF-DB, AffectNet, and CAER-S datasets have proven the effectiveness and superiority of ECDNet.