  Pain is a personal, subjective experience that is commonly evaluated through
visual analog scales (VAS). While this is often convenient and useful,
automatic pain detection systems can reduce pain score acquisition efforts in
large-scale studies by estimating it directly from the participants' facial
expressions. In this paper, we propose a novel two-stage learning approach for
VAS estimation: first, our algorithm employs Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs)
to automatically estimate Prkachin and Solomon Pain Intensity (PSPI) levels
from face images. The estimated scores are then fed into the personalized
Hidden Conditional Random Fields (HCRFs), used to estimate the VAS, provided by
each person. Personalization of the model is performed using a newly introduced
facial expressiveness score, unique for each person. To the best of our
knowledge, this is the first approach to automatically estimate VAS from face
images. We show the benefits of the proposed personalized over traditional
non-personalized approach on a benchmark dataset for pain analysis from face
images.
