Automated Facial Pain Assessment Using Dual-Attention CNN with Clinically Calibrated High-Reliability and Reproducibility Framework

Accurate and quantitative pain assessment remains a major challenge in clinical medicine, especially for patients unable to verbalize discomfort. Conventional methods based on self-reports or clinician observation are subjective and inconsistent. This study introduces a novel automated facial pain assessment framework built on a dual-attention convolutional neural network (CNN) that achieves clinically calibrated, high-reliability performance and interpretability. The architecture combines multi-head spatial attention to localize pain-relevant facial regions with an enhanced channel attention block employing triple-pooling (average, max, and standard deviation) to capture discriminative intensity features. Regularization through label smoothing (α = 0.1) and AdamW optimization ensures calibrated, stable convergence. Evaluated on a clinically annotated dataset using subject-wise stratified sampling, the proposed model achieved a test accuracy of 90.19% ± 0.94%, with an average 5-fold cross-validation accuracy of 83.60% ± 1.55%. The model further attained an F1-score of 0.90 and Cohen’s κ = 0.876, with macro- and micro-AUCs of 0.991 and 0.992, respectively. The evaluation covers five pain classes (No Pain, Mid Pain, Moderate Pain, Severe Pain, and Very Pain) using subject-wise splits comprising 5840 total images and 1160 test samples. Comparative benchmarking and ablation experiments confirm each module’s contribution, while Grad-CAM visualizations highlight physiologically relevant facial regions. The results demonstrate a robust, explainable, and reproducible framework suitable for integration into real-world automated pain-monitoring systems. Inspired by biological pain perception mechanisms and human facial muscle responses, the proposed framework aligns with biomimetic sensing principles by emulating how localized facial cues contribute to pain interpretation.