Title
Facial expression recognition using active contour-based face detection, facial movement-based feature extraction, and non-linear feature selection.
Abstract
Knowledge about people’s emotions can serve as an important context for automatic service delivery in context-aware systems. Hence, human facial expression recognition (FER) has emerged as an important research area over the last two decades. To accurately recognize expressions, FER systems require automatic face detection followed by the extraction of robust features from important facial parts. Furthermore, the process should be less susceptible to the presence of noise, such as different lighting conditions and variations in facial characteristics of subjects. Accordingly, this work implements a robust FER system, capable of providing high recognition accuracy even in the presence of aforementioned variations. The system uses an unsupervised technique based on active contour model for automatic face detection and extraction. In this model, a combination of two energy functions: Chan–Vese energy and Bhattacharyya distance functions are employed to minimize the dissimilarities within a face and maximize the distance between the face and the background. Next, noise reduction is achieved by means of wavelet decomposition, followed by the extraction of facial movement features using optical flow. These features reflect facial muscle movements which signify static, dynamic, geometric, and appearance characteristics of facial expressions. Post-feature extraction, feature selection, is performed using Stepwise Linear Discriminant Analysis, which is more robust in contrast to previously employed feature selection methods for FER. Finally, expressions are recognized using trained HMM(s). To show the robustness of the proposed system, unlike most of the previous works, which were evaluated using a single dataset, performance of the proposed system is assessed in a large-scale experimentation using five publicly available different datasets. The weighted average recognition rate across these datasets indicates the success of employing the proposed system for FER.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1007/s00530-014-0400-2
Multimedia Systems
Keywords
Field
DocType
Facial expressions, Face detection, Active contour, Level set, Wavelet transform, Optical flow, Stepwise linear discriminant analysis, Hidden Markov model
Computer vision,Face hallucination,Bhattacharyya distance,Three-dimensional face recognition,Feature selection,Pattern recognition,Computer science,Feature extraction,Facial expression,Artificial intelligence,Linear discriminant analysis,Face detection
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
21
6
1432-1882
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
13
0.68
33
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Muhammad Hameed Siddiqi110510.85
Rahman Ali2383.18
Adil Mehmood Khan329015.61
Eun-Soo Kim49512.36
Gerard Jounghyun Kim557151.97
Sungyoung Lee62932279.41