Papers › Towards an objective characterization of an individual's facial movements using...
Towards an objective characterization of an individual's facial movements using Self-Supervised Person-Specific-Models
Yanis Tazi, Michael Berger, Winrich A. Freiwald
Disentangling facial movements from other facial characteristics, particularly from facial identity, remains a challenging task, as facial movements display great variation between individuals. In this paper, we aim to characterize individual-specific facial movements. We present a novel training approach to learn facial movements independently of other facial characteristics, focusing on each individual separately. We propose self-supervised Person-Specific Models (PSMs), in which one model per individual can learn to extract an embedding of the facial movements independently of the person's identity and other structural facial characteristics from unlabeled facial video. These models are trained using encoder-decoder-like architectures. We provide quantitative and qualitative evidence that a PSM learns a meaningful facial embedding that discovers fine-grained movements otherwise not characterized by a General Model (GM), which is trained across individuals and characterizes general patterns of facial movements. We present quantitative and qualitative evidence that this approach is easily scalable and generalizable for new individuals: facial movements knowledge learned on a person can quickly and effectively be transferred to a new person. Lastly, we propose a novel PSM using curriculum temporal learning to leverage the temporal contiguity between video frames. Our code, analysis details, and all pretrained models are available in Github and Supplementary Materials.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections