  Cross-domain synthesizing realistic faces to learn deep models has attracted
increasing attention for facial expression analysis as it helps to improve the
performance of expression recognition accuracy despite having small number of
real training images. However, learning from synthetic face images can be
problematic due to the distribution discrepancy between low-quality synthetic
images and real face images and may not achieve the desired performance when
the learned model applies to real world scenarios. To this end, we propose a
new attribute guided face image synthesis to perform a translation between
multiple image domains using a single model. In addition, we adopt the proposed
model to learn from synthetic faces by matching the feature distributions
between different domains while preserving each domain's characteristics. We
evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on several face datasets on
generating realistic face images. We demonstrate that the expression
recognition performance can be enhanced by benefiting from our face synthesis
model. Moreover, we also conduct experiments on a near-infrared dataset
containing facial expression videos of drivers to assess the performance using
in-the-wild data for driver emotion recognition.
