Emotional Dog Faces | tech4animals

Emotional Dog Faces Dataset

Animal affective computing is a new, exciting area which is growing quickly. Mammals can produce a variety of facial behaviors which may be linked to their affective states. So far, most works applying AI for facial expression analysis for animals focused on pain (such as Feighelstein et al). Moreover, dogs have not yet been addressed in this context due to their complex facial morphology and expressions.

In this research project, we aim to take the first step to change that! In collaboration with Dr. Annika Bremhorst from Dogs and Science, the Tech4Animals Lab is proud to present the first dataset of dog faces in positive and negative emotions, collected through a controlled experiment. The dataset contains dog faces cut from video clips of 29 Labrador Retrievers in two emotional states:

Negative (frustration) and Positive (anticipation)

For more details on our study, please see our research paper. If you intend to use our dataset in a scientific publication, Please acknowledge the Tech4Animals Lab at the University of Haifa, and cite the papers:

Boneh-Shitrit, T., Feighelstein, M., Bremhorst, A., Amir, S., Distelfeld, T., Dassa, Y., ... & Zamansky, A. (2022). Explainable automated recognition of emotional states from canine facial expressions: the case of positive anticipation and frustration. Scientific reports, 12(1), 22611.

Bremhorst, A., Sutter, N. A., Würbel, H., Mills, D. S., & Riemer, S. (2019). Differences in facial expressions during positive anticipation and frustration in dogs awaiting a reward. Scientific reports, 9(1), 1-13.

We encourage collaboration and welcome researchers and data scientists interested in this area to join us in refining these methods and expanding our understanding of animal emotions.

To obtain access to the dataset, please email Anna Zamansky.

We firmly believe in the power of open data to fuel advancements in animal emotion recognition.

Project Team