Automatic Pain Intensity Estimation with Heteroscedastic Conditional Ordinal Random Fields

Automatic pain intensity estimation from facial images is challenging mainly because of high variability in subject-specific pain expressiveness. This heterogeneity in the subjects causes their facial appearance to vary significantly when experiencing the same pain level. The standard classification methods (e.g., SVMs) do not provide a principled way of accounting for this heterogeneity. To this end, we propose the heteroscedastic Conditional Ordinal Random Field (CORF) model for automatic estimation of pain intensity. This model generalizes the CORF framework for modeling sequences of ordinal variables, by adapting it for heteroscedasticity. This is attained by allowing the variance in the ordinal probit model in the CORF to change depending on the input features, resulting in the model able to adapt to the pain expressiveness level specific to each subject. Our experimental results on the UNBC Shoulder Pain Database show that modeling heterogeneity in the subjects with the framework of CORFs improves the pain intensity estimation attained by the standard CORF model, and the other commonly used classification models.