Towards Pain Monitoring: Facial Expression, Head Pose, a new Database, an Automatic System and Remaining Challenges

Abstract

Pain is what the patient says it is. But what about these who cannot utter? Automatic pain monitoring opens up prospects for better treatment, but accurate assessment of pain is challenging due to the subjective nature of pain. To facilitate advances, we contribute a new dataset, the BioVid Heat Pain Database which contains videos and physiological data of 90 persons subjected to well-defined pain stimuli of 4 intensities. We propose a fully automatic recognition system utilizing facial expression, head pose information and their dynamics. The approach is evaluated with the task of pain detection on the new dataset, also outlining open challenges for pain monitoring in general. Additionally, we analyze the relevance of head pose information for pain recognition and compare person-specific and general classification models.