Facial StO2-based Stress Recognition using Automatic Graph Generation and Dual-Stream GNN

The recognition of stress responses in health, resilience, and psychopathology holds significant scientific importance. The biological information carried by the facial tissue oxygen saturation (StO2) is a useful indicator for stress recognition. Although graph-based methods have achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA), there is room for improvement. This study proposes an automatic graph generation method for facial StO2, replacing manual methods and enhancing the information of graphs. To further enhance the capability of graphs’ representation, a dimensionality reduction strategy for nodes is proposed. The strategy is implemented based on an novel objective function that can increase the inter-class distance and reduce the intra-class distance. After obtaining highly representative graphs, a dual-stream network integrating GAT and GCN is designed to extract stress-related features from the graphs, ultimately achieving the SOTA recognition accuracy.