The first facial expression recognition and analysis challenge

Automatic Facial Expression Recognition and Analysis, in particular FACS Action Unit (AU) detection and discrete emotion detection, has been an active topic in computer science for over two decades. Standardisation and comparability has come some way; for instance, there exist a number of commonly used facial expression databases. However, lack of a common evaluation protocol and lack of sufficient details to reproduce the reported individual results make it difficult to compare systems to each other. This in turn hinders the progress of the field. A periodical challenge in Facial Expression Recognition and Analysis would allow this comparison in a fair manner. It would clarify how far the field has come, and would allow us to identify new goals, challenges and targets. In this paper we present the first challenge in automatic recognition of facial expressions to be held during the IEEE conference on Face and Gesture Recognition 2011, in Santa Barbara, California. Two sub-challenges are defined: one on AU detection and another on discrete emotion detection. It outlines the evaluation protocol, the data used, and the results of a baseline method for the two sub-challenges.