Contents

2. Detecting facial expressions from images

2. Detecting facial expressions from images

Written by Jin Hyun Cheong and Eshin Jolly

In this tutorial we’ll explore the Detector class in more depth, demonstrating how to detect faces, facial landmarks, action units, and emotions from images. You can try it out interactively in Google Collab: Open In Colab

# Uncomment the line below and run this only if you're using Google Collab
# !pip install -q py-feat

2.1 Detecting a single face from a single image

Setting up the Detector

When using the Detector you can either specify specific models to use or just load the default models which are defined explicitly below:

from feat import Detector

detector = Detector(
    face_model="retinaface",
    landmark_model="mobilenet",
    au_model="rf",
    emotion_model="rf",
    facepose_model="pnp"
)

detector

Let’s process a single image with a single face. Py-feat includes a demo image for this purpose called single_face.jpg so lets use that. You can also use the convenient imshow function which will automatically load an image into a numpy array if provided a path unlike matplotlib:

from feat.utils import get_test_data_path
from feat.plotting import imshow
import os

# Helper to point to the test data folder
test_data_dir = get_test_data_path()

# Get the full path
single_face_img_path = os.path.join(test_data_dir, "single_face.jpg")

# Plot it
imshow(single_face_img_path)
../_images/02_detector_imgs_6_0.png

Now we use our initialized detector instance to make predictions with the detect_image() method. This is the main workhorse method that will perform face, landmark, au, and emotion detection using the loaded models. It always returns a Fex data instance:

single_face_prediction = detector.detect_image(single_face_img_path)

# Show results
single_face_prediction
frame FaceRectX FaceRectY FaceRectWidth FaceRectHeight FaceScore x_0 x_1 x_2 x_3 ... Roll Yaw anger disgust fear happiness sadness surprise neutral input
0 0 196.976837 140.997742 173.810486 257.639343 0.999681 192.864593 191.586715 192.874618 197.394792 ... -1.903955 4.869262 0.000369 0.000026 0.000485 0.986996 0.000046 0.01201 0.000068 /Users/Esh/Documents/pypackages/py-feat/feat/t...

1 rows × 173 columns

Working with Fex data class results

Because the output is a Fex data class instance, we can utilize its various helper methods and attributes to inspect our predictions.

Easily accessing FEX columns of interest.

Fex data classes make it simple to access various columns of interest (AUs, emotion, faceboxes, etc):

single_face_prediction.facebox
FaceRectX FaceRectY FaceRectWidth FaceRectHeight FaceScore
0 196.976837 140.997742 173.810486 257.639343 0.999681 
single_face_prediction.aus
AU01 AU02 AU04 AU06 AU07 AU10 AU12 AU14 AU15 AU17 AU23 AU24
0 0.546606 0.96656 0.001263 0.942192 0.757494 0.074272 0.997331 0.113582 0.031618 0.000369 0.001004 0.000002 
single_face_prediction.emotions
anger disgust fear happiness sadness surprise neutral
0 0.000369 0.000026 0.000485 0.986996 0.000046 0.01201 0.000068 
single_face_prediction.facepose # (in degrees)
Pitch Roll Yaw
0 0.968232 -1.903955 4.869262

Saving detection to a file

We can also save our detection directly to a file by specifying an outputFname when using .detect_image. The detector will return True when it’s finished.

detector.detect_image(single_face_img_path, outputFname = "output.csv")
frame FaceRectX FaceRectY FaceRectWidth FaceRectHeight FaceScore x_0 x_1 x_2 x_3 ... Roll Yaw anger disgust fear happiness sadness surprise neutral input
0 0 196.976837 140.997742 173.810486 257.639343 0.999681 192.864593 191.586715 192.874618 197.394792 ... -1.903955 4.869262 0.000369 0.000026 0.000485 0.986996 0.000046 0.01201 0.000068 /Users/Esh/Documents/pypackages/py-feat/feat/t...

1 rows × 165 columns

Loading detection results from a saved file

We can load this output using the read_feat() function, which behaves just like pd.read_csv from Pandas, but returns a Fex data class instead of a DataFrame. This gives you the full suite of Fex funcionality right away.

# prefer to pandas read_csv
from feat.utils import read_feat

input_prediction = read_feat("output.csv")

# Show results
input_prediction
frame FaceRectX FaceRectY FaceRectWidth FaceRectHeight FaceScore x_0 x_1 x_2 x_3 ... Roll Yaw anger disgust fear happiness sadness surprise neutral input
0 0 196.97684 140.99774 173.81049 257.63934 0.999681 192.864593 191.586715 192.874618 197.394792 ... -1.903955 4.869262 0.000369 0.000026 0.000485 0.986996 0.000046 0.01201 0.000068 output.csv

1 rows × 165 columns

Visualizing detection results.

We can use the .plot_detections() method to generate a summary figure of detected faces, action units and emotions. It always returns a list of matplotlib figures:

figs = single_face_prediction.plot_detections(poses=True)
../_images/02_detector_imgs_21_0.png

By default .plot_detections() will overlay facial lines on top of the input image. However, it’s also possible to visualize a face using Py-Feat’s standardized AU landmark model, which takes the detected AUs and projects them onto a template face. You an control this by change by setting faces='aus' instead of the default faces='landmarks'. `For more details about this kind of visualization see tutorial 4:

figs = single_face_prediction.plot_detections(faces='aus', muscles=True)
../_images/02_detector_imgs_23_0.png

2.2 Detecting multiple faces from a single image

A Detector can automatically find multiple faces in a single image. We’ll see that in the next example, the number of rows of the Fex data class returned from .detect_image() has one row for each detected face. We’ll also try using a different model this time, Img2Pose, which acts as both a face detector and a face pose estimator.

Notice how image_prediction is now a Fex instance with 5 rows, one for each detected face. We can confirm this by plotting our detection results and poses like before:

multi_face_image_path = os.path.join(test_data_dir, "multi_face.jpg")
multi_face_prediction = detector.detect_image(multi_face_image_path)

# Show results
multi_face_prediction
frame FaceRectX FaceRectY FaceRectWidth FaceRectHeight FaceScore x_0 x_1 x_2 x_3 ... Roll Yaw anger disgust fear happiness sadness surprise neutral input
0 0 683.844116 288.876495 103.788025 134.104675 0.999768 686.784072 684.581417 683.259728 683.543441 ... 8.618552 10.884868 0.050378 0.002782 0.160675 0.011653 0.587488 0.075299 0.111725 /Users/Esh/Documents/pypackages/py-feat/feat/t...
1 0 533.678894 309.400024 96.237732 124.128448 0.999421 536.352308 533.773775 532.264482 532.354004 ... 8.18921 7.956858 0.03112 0.001458 0.186241 0.104354 0.269578 0.014566 0.392683 /Users/Esh/Documents/pypackages/py-feat/feat/t...
2 0 316.984406 233.779205 92.016876 126.462952 0.999196 314.601803 315.56932 317.556661 320.979813 ... -2.193695 -9.569049 0.033716 0.114599 0.055362 0.181432 0.060542 0.110806 0.443542 /Users/Esh/Documents/pypackages/py-feat/feat/t...
3 0 221.29747 64.152306 85.109207 109.057442 0.996842 221.084805 218.956039 217.532472 217.588807 ... 12.539567 -11.006074 0.000943 0.001107 0.036498 0.08564 0.020177 0.772348 0.083288 /Users/Esh/Documents/pypackages/py-feat/feat/t...
4 0 437.129089 213.861359 79.529785 97.050537 0.996773 439.01578 438.598761 439.10614 440.473299 ... 1.993561 -1.891783 0.20795 0.002251 0.002176 0.416435 0.002668 0.219107 0.149411 /Users/Esh/Documents/pypackages/py-feat/feat/t...

5 rows × 173 columns

figs = multi_face_prediction.plot_detections(add_titles=False)
../_images/02_detector_imgs_26_0.png

2.3 Detecting faces from multiple images

Detector is also flexible enough to process multiple image files simultaneously if .detect_image() is passed a list of images. You can process multiple images in a batch to speed up processing, but all images in a batch must have the same dimensions.

In the example below we process both our single and multi-face example images from above, but force Py-Feat not to batch process them by setting batch_size = 1.

Notice how the returned Fex data class instance has 6 rows: 1 for the first face in the first image, and 5 for the faces in the second image:

img_list = [single_face_img_path, multi_face_image_path]

mixed_prediction = detector.detect_image(img_list, batch_size=1)
mixed_prediction
frame FaceRectX FaceRectY FaceRectWidth FaceRectHeight FaceScore x_0 x_1 x_2 x_3 ... Roll Yaw anger disgust fear happiness sadness surprise neutral input
0 0 196.976837 140.997742 173.810486 257.639343 0.999681 192.864593 191.586715 192.874618 197.394792 ... -1.903955 4.869262 0.000369 0.000026 0.000485 0.986996 0.000046 0.01201 0.000068 /Users/Esh/Documents/pypackages/py-feat/feat/t...
1 1 683.844116 288.876495 103.788025 134.104675 0.999768 686.784072 684.581417 683.259728 683.543441 ... 8.618552 10.884868 0.050378 0.002782 0.160675 0.011653 0.587488 0.075299 0.111725 /Users/Esh/Documents/pypackages/py-feat/feat/t...
2 1 533.678894 309.400024 96.237732 124.128448 0.999421 536.352308 533.773775 532.264482 532.354004 ... 8.18921 7.956858 0.03112 0.001458 0.186241 0.104354 0.269578 0.014566 0.392683 /Users/Esh/Documents/pypackages/py-feat/feat/t...
3 1 316.984406 233.779205 92.016876 126.462952 0.999196 314.601803 315.56932 317.556661 320.979813 ... -2.193695 -9.569049 0.033716 0.114599 0.055362 0.181432 0.060542 0.110806 0.443542 /Users/Esh/Documents/pypackages/py-feat/feat/t...
4 1 221.29747 64.152306 85.109207 109.057442 0.996842 221.084805 218.956039 217.532472 217.588807 ... 12.539567 -11.006074 0.000943 0.001107 0.036498 0.08564 0.020177 0.772348 0.083288 /Users/Esh/Documents/pypackages/py-feat/feat/t...
5 1 437.129089 213.861359 79.529785 97.050537 0.996773 439.01578 438.598761 439.10614 440.473299 ... 1.993561 -1.891783 0.20795 0.002251 0.002176 0.416435 0.002668 0.219107 0.149411 /Users/Esh/Documents/pypackages/py-feat/feat/t...

6 rows × 173 columns

Calling .plot_detections() will now plot detections for all images the detector was passed:

figs = mixed_prediction.plot_detections(add_titles=False)
../_images/02_detector_imgs_30_0.png ../_images/02_detector_imgs_30_1.png

However, it’s easy to use pandas slicing sytax to just grab predictions for the image you want. For example you can use .loc and chain it to .plot_detections():

# Just plot the detection corresponding to the first row in the Fex data
figs = mixed_prediction.loc[0].plot_detections(add_titles=False)
../_images/02_detector_imgs_32_0.png

Likewise you can use .query() and chain it to .plot_detections(). Fex data classes store each file path in the 'input' column. So we can use regular pandas methods like .unique() to get all the unique images (2 in our case) and pick the second one.

# Choose plot based on image file name
img_name = mixed_prediction['input'].unique()[1]
axes = mixed_prediction.query("input == @img_name").plot_detections(add_titles=False)
../_images/02_detector_imgs_34_0.png

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1. Py-Feat basics

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3. Detecting facial expressions from videos