Learning pain from emotion: Transferred HoT data representation for pain intensity estimation

Abstract

Automatic monitoring for the assessment of pain can significantly improve the psychological comfort of patients. Recently introduced databases with expert annotation opened the way for pain intensity estimation from facial analysis. In this contribution, pivotal face elements are identified using theHistograms of Topographical features (HoT) which are a generalization of the topographical primal sketch. In order to improve the discrimination between different pain intensity values and respectively the generalization with respect to the monitored persons, we transfer data representation from the emotion oriented Cohn-Kanade database to the UNBC McMaster Shoulder Pain database.