The Competition is a continuation of the respective Competitions held at CVPR in 2024, 2023, 2022 & 2017, at ECCV in 2024 & 2022, at ICCV in 2021 and at IEEE FG in 2020. It is split into the six below mentioned Challenges. Participants are invited to participate in at least one of these Challenges.

How to participate

In order to participate, teams will have to register. There is a maximum number of 8 participants in each team.

VA Estimation, EXPR Recognition and AU Detection Challenges

If you want to participate in any of these three Challenges you should follow the below procedure for registration.

The lead researcher should send an email from their official address (no personal emails will be accepted) to d.kollias@qmul.ac.uk with:

i) subject "8th ABAW Competition: Team Registration";

ii) this EULA (if the team is composed of only academics) or this EULA (if the team has at least one member coming from the industry) filled in, signed and attached;

iii) the lead researcher's official academic/industrial website; the lead researcher cannot be a student (UG/PG/Ph.D.);

iv) the emails of each team member, each one in a separate line in the body of the email;

v) the team's name;

vi) the point of contact name and email address (which member of the team will be the main point of contact for future communications, data access etc)

As a reply, you will receive access to the dataset's cropped/cropped-aligned images and annotations and other important information.

CE Recognition Challenge

If you want to participate in this Challenge you should follow the below procedure for registration.

The lead researcher should send an email from their official address (no personal emails will be accepted) to d.kollias@qmul.ac.uk with:

i) subject "8th ABAW Competition: Team Registration";

ii) this EULA (if the team is composed of only academics) or this EULA (if the team has at least one member coming from the industry) filled in, signed and attached;

iii) the lead researcher's official academic/industrial website; the lead researcher cannot be a student (UG/PG/Ph.D.);

iv) the emails of each team member, each one in a separate line in the body of the email;

v) the team's name;

vi) the point of contact name and email address (which member of the team will be the main point of contact for future communications, data access etc)

As a reply, you will receive access to the dataset's videos and other important information.

EMI Estimation Challenge

If you want to participate in this Challenge please email competitions@hume.ai with the following information:

i) subject "8th ABAW Competition: Team Registration"

ii) name and email for the lead researcher's official academic/industrial website; the lead researcher cannot be a student (UG/PG/Ph.D.)

iii) the names and emails of each team member, each one in separate line in the body of the email

iv) team’s name

iv) the point of contact name and email address (which member of the team will be the main point of contact for future communications, data access etc) the team's name.

A reply to sign an EULA will be sent to all team members. When the EULA is signed by all team members a link to the data will be shared.

AH Recognition Challenge

If you want to participate in this Challenge you should follow the below procedure for registration.

i) fill in and sign this EULA;

ii) fill in this form, and submit it. Please use this form to upload your signed EULA;

iii) both documents must be signed by a person with a full-time faculty position at a university, higher education institution, or equivalent organization. The signee cannot be a student (UG/PG/Ph.D.).

Once both documents are received, we will contact you to provide data access including the raw BAH dataset, cropped-aligned faces at each frame, transcripts with timestamps, frame and video annotation, and documentation.

Competition Contact Information

For any queries you may have regarding the first 4 Challenges (VA Estimation/AU Detection/EXPR Recognition/CE Recognition), please contact d.kollias@qmul.ac.uk.

For any queries you may have regarding the fifth Challenge (EMI Estimation), please contact competitions@hume.ai.

For any queries you may have regarding the sixth Challenge (AH Recognition), please contact soufiane.belharbi.1@etsmtl.net.

General Information

At the end of the Challenges, each team will have to send us:

i) a link to a Github repository where their solution/source code will be stored,

ii) a link to an ArXiv paper with 2-8 pages describing their proposed methodology, data used and results.

Each team will also need to upload their test set predictions on an evaluation server (details will be circulated when the test set is released).

After that, the winner of each Challenge, along with a leaderboard, will be announced.

There will be one winner per Challenge. The top-3 performing teams of each Challenge will have to contribute paper(s) describing their approach, methodology and results to our Workshop; the accepted papers will be part of the CVPR 2025 proceedings. All other teams are also able to submit paper(s) describing their solutions and final results; the accepted papers will be part of the CVPR 2025 proceedings.

The Competition's white paper (describing the Competition, the data, the baselines and results) will be ready at a later stage and will be distributed to the participating teams.

General Rules

1) Participants can contribute to any of the 6 Challenges.

2) In order to take part in any Challenge, participants will have to register as described above.

3) Any face detector whether commercial or academic can be used in the challenge. The paper accompanying the challenge result submission should contain clear details of the detectors/libraries used.

4) The top performing teams will have to share their solution (code, model weights, executables) with the organisers upon completion of the challenge; in this way the organisers will check so as to prevent cheating or violation of rules.