Automatic Pain Recognition from Video and Biomedical Signals

How much does it hurt? Accurate assessment of pain is very important for selecting the right treatment, however current methods are not sufficiently valid and reliable in many cases. Automatic pain monitoring may help by providing an objective and continuous assessment. In this paper we propose an automatic pain recognition system combining information from video and biomedical signals, namely facial expression, head movement, galvanic skin response, electromyography and electrocardiogram. Using the BioVid Heat Pain Database, the system is evaluated in the task of pain detection showing significant improvement over the current state of the art. Further, we discuss the relevance of the modalities and compare person-specific and generic classification models.