Hierarchical Event-RGB Interaction Network for single-eye expression recognition

Abstract

The Single-eye Expression Recognition task stands as a crucial vision task, aimed at decoding human emotional states through careful examination of the eye region. Nevertheless, traditional cameras face challenges in detecting and capturing relevant biological information, especially under demanding lighting conditions such as dim environments, high exposure scenarios, or when other radiation sources are present. In this regard, we use a new type of sensor data that can resist extreme lighting conditions, namely event camera data, to improve the performance of single-eye expression recognition. To this end, we propose a novel Hierarchical Event-RGB Interaction Network (HI-Net), to fully integrate RGB and event data to overcome the extreme lighting challenges faced by the single-eye expression recognition task. The HI-Net contains two novel designs: Event-RGB Semantic Interaction Mechanism (ER-SIM) and Hierarchical Semantics Modeling (HSM) Scheme. The former aims to achieve interaction between Event and RGB modality semantics, while the latter aims to obtain high-quality modality semantic representations. In the ER-SIM, we employ an effective cross-attention mechanism to facilitate information fusion, to adaptively integrate and complement multi-scale Event and RGB semantics to cope with extreme lighting conditions. In HSM Scheme, we first explore multi-scale contextual semantics for the event modality and the RGB modality respectively. Then, we perform a semantics interaction strategy for these multi-scale contextual semantics, to enhance each modality's semantic representation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our HI-Net significantly outperforms many state-of-the-art methods on the single-eye expression recognition task, especially under degraded lighting conditions.