Encoding Temporal Information for Automatic Depression Recognition from Facial Analysis

Depression is a mental illness that may be harmful to an individual's health. Using deep learning models to recognize the facial expressions of individuals captured in videos has shown promising results for automatic depression detection. Typically, depression levels are recognized using 2D-Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) that are trained to extract static features from video frames, which impairs the capture of dynamic spatio-temporal relations. As an alternative, 3D-CNNs may be employed to extract spatiotemporal features from short video clips, although the risk of overfitting increases due to the limited availability of labeled depression video data. To address these issues, we propose a novel temporal pooling method to capture and encode the spatio-temporal dynamic of video clips into an image map. This approach allows fine-tuning a pre-trained 2D CNN to model facial variations, and thereby improving the training process and model accuracy. Our proposed method is based on two-stream model that performs late fusion of appearance and dynamic information. Extensive experiments on two benchmark AVEC datasets indicate that the proposed method is efficient and outperforms the state-of-the-art schemes.