Aff-Wild: Valence and Arousal ‘in-the-wild’ Challenge

The Affect-in-the-Wild (Aff-Wild) Challenge proposes a new comprehensive benchmark for assessing the performance of facial affect/behaviour analysis/understanding ‘in-the-wild’. The Aff-wild benchmark contains about 300 videos (over 2,000 minutes of data) annotated with regards to valence and arousal, all captured ‘in-the-wild’ (the main source being Youtube videos). The paper presents the database description, the experimental set up, the baseline method used for the Challenge and finally the summary of the performance of the different methods submitted to the Affect-in-the-Wild Challenge for Valence and Arousal estimation. The challenge demonstrates that meticulously designed deep neural networks can achieve very good performance when trained with in-the-wild data.