Accurately assessing the intensity of pain from facial expressions captured in videos is crucial for effective pain management and critical for a wide range of healthcare applications. However, in uncontrolled environments, detecting facial expressions from full left and right profiles remains a significant challenge, and even the most advanced models for recognizing pain levels based on facial expressions can suffer from declining performance. In this study, we present a novel model designed to overcome the challenges posed by full left and right profiles—Sparse Autoencoders for Facial Expressions-based Pain Assessment (SAFEPA). Our model utilizes Sparse Autoencoders (SAE) to reconstruct the upper part of the face from the input image, and feeds both the original image and the reconstructed upper face into two pre-trained concurrent and coupled Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). This approach gives more weight to the upper part of the face, resulting in superior recognition performance. Moreover, SAFEPA’s design leverages CNNs’ strengths while also accommodating variations in head poses, thus eliminating the need for face detection and upper-face extraction preprocessing steps needed in other models. SAFEPA achieves high accuracy in recognizing four levels of pain on the widely used UNBC-McMaster shoulder pain expression archive dataset. SAFEPA is extended for facial expression recognition, where we show it to outperform state-of-the-art models in recognizing seven facial expressions viewed from five different angles, including the challenging full left and right profiles, on the Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces (KDEF) dataset. Furthermore, the SAFEPA system is capable of processing BioVid Heat Pain datasets with an average processing time of 17.82 s per video (5 s in length), while maintaining a competitive accuracy compared to other state-of-the-art pain detection systems. This experiment demonstrates its applicability in real-life scenarios for monitoring systems. With SAFEPA, we have opened new possibilities for accurate pain assessment, even in challenging situations with varying head poses.

We present four high performance hybrid sorting methods developed for various parallel platforms: shared memory multiprocessors, distributed multiprocessors, and clusters taking advantage of existence of both shared and distributed memory. Merge sort, known for its stability, is used to design several of our algorithms. We improve its parallel performance by combining it with Quicksort. We present two models designed for shared memory MIMD (OpenMP): (a) a non-recursive Merge sort and (b) a hybrid Quicksort and Merge sort. The third model presented is designed for distributed memory MIMD (MPI) using a hybrid Quicksort and Merge sort. Our fourth model is designed to take advantage of the shared memory within individual nodes of today's cluster systems, and to eliminate all internal data transfers between different nodes, Our model implements a one-step MSD-Radix to distribute data in ten packets (MPI) while parallel cores of each node use Quicksort to sort their data partitions sequentially then merge and sort them in parallel employing the OpenMp. The performances of all developed models outperform the baseline performance. Hybrid Quicksort and Merge sort outperformed Hybrid Memory Parallel Merge Sort using Hybrid MSD-Radix and Quicksort in Cluster Platforms when sorting small size data, but with larger data the speedup of Hybrid Memory Parallel Merge Sort Using Hybrid MSD-Radix and Quicksort in Cluster Platforms becomes bigger and it keeps improving. The speedup of Distributed Memory Parallel Hybrid Quicksort and Merge Sort is the best.