An Intelligent Approach for Continuous Pain Intensity Prediction

Facial expressions are an important indicator of pain, with different types of pain being associated with distinct facial expressions. Recent advances in deep learning have shown the potential for Machine learning techniques to automatically recognize and classify facial expressions of pain. In this study, we propose a method for pain analysis based on the LSTM architecture. The extracted features are fed into a LSTM network for pain level classification. To evaluate the proposed method, we conducted experiments on our comprehensive X-ITE dataset of facial expressions. The results showed that our method is capable of detecting different, even weak, pain intensities on the dataset with a high accuracy. Overall, our study demonstrates the potential of using the LSTM architecture for pain analysis based on facial expressions. The proposed method has important applications in clinical settings, such as pain assessment and management for patients who are unable to communicate their pain verbally, such as infants or individuals with cognitive impairments.