Exploring Macroscopic Fluctuation of Facial Expression for Mood Disorder Classification

In clinical diagnosis of mood disorder, a large portion of bipolar disorder patients (BDs) are misdiagnosed as unipolar depression (UDs). Clinicians have confirmed that BDs generally show "reduced affect'' during clinical treatment. Thus, it is expected to build an objective and one-time diagnosis system for diagnosis assistance by using machine-learning techniques. In this study, facial expressions of BD, UD and control group (C) elicited by emotional video clips are collected for exploring temporal fluctuation characteristics of intensities of facial muscles expression among the three groups. The differences of facial expressions among mood disorders are investigated by observing macroscopic fluctuations. To deal with these problems, the corresponding methods for feature extraction and modeling are proposed. From the viewpoint of macroscopic facial expression, action unit (AU) is applied for describing the temporal transformation of muscles. Then, modulation spectrum is used for extracting short-term variation of AU. The multilayer perceptron (MLP)-based disorder prediction model is then applied to obtain the prediction results. For evaluation of the proposed method, 12 subjects for three group are included in the K-fold (K=12) cross validation experiments. The experiment results reached 61.1% classification accuracy, and outperformed the other baseline methods.