Automated Evaluation of Taste Preference using Dynamics of Facial Expressions

The level of taste liking is an important measure for a number of applications such as the prediction of long-term consumer acceptance for different food and beverage products. Based on the fact that facial expressions are spontaneous, instant and heterogeneous sources of information, this paper aims to automatically estimate the level of taste liking through facial expression videos. Instead of using handcrafted features, the proposed approach deep learns the regional expression dynamics, and encodes them to a Fisher vector for video representation. Regional Fisher vectors are then concatenated, and classified by linear SVM classifiers. The aim is to reveal the hidden patterns of taste-elicited responses by exploiting expression dynamics such as the speed and acceleration of facial movements. To this end, we have collected the first large-scale beverage tasting database in the literature. The database has 2970 videos of taste-induced facial expressions collected from 495 subjects. Our large-scale experiments on this database show that the proposed approach achieves an accuracy of 70.37% for distinguishing between three levels of taste-liking. Furthermore, we assess the human performance recruiting 45 participants, and show that humans are significantly less reliable for estimating taste appreciation from facial expressions in comparison to the proposed method. Index Terms—Taste liking, taste appreciation, facial expression dynamics, spontaneous expression, taste-induced expression.