Structural self-contrast learning based on adaptive weighted negative samples for facial expression recognition

Huihui Li, Junhao Zhu, Guihua Wen, Haoyang Zhong

Abstract: Face expression recognition in the wild faces challenges such as small data size, low quality images, and noisy labels. In order to solve these problems, this paper proposes a novel structural self-contrast learning method (SSCL) based on adaptively weighted negative samples. Firstly, two augmented variants are generated for each input sample as positive samples, which should be as similar in structure as possible. Secondly, EMD (Earth’s Mover Distance) is used to define the structural similarity between the two augmented samples and extract the features in a self-supervised way. Subsequently, the concept of negative samples is further introduced into SSCL, and the augmented variants of other categories are generated as negative samples, which makes the structural similarity between positive samples increase and between negative samples simultaneously decrease. Finally, an adaptive weighting method for the negative is proposed, which aims to solve the imbalance between positive samples and negative samples, mine difficult negative samples, and reduce their similarity with the input image in an adaptive way. The extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that SSCL outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. The cross-dataset evaluation shows the superior generalization capability of the proposed method. The code will be available at https://github.com/zjhzhy/SSCL.

External IDs:dblp:journals/vc/LiZWZ25