Facial expression recognition with emotion-based feature fusion

© 2015 Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association. In this paper, we propose an emotion-based feature fusion method using the Discriminant-Analysis of Canonical Correlations (DCC) for facial expression recognition. There have been many image features or descriptors proposed for facial expression recognition. For the different features, they may be more accurate for the recognition of different expressions. In our proposed method, four effective descriptors for facial expression representation, namely Local Binary Pattern (LBP), Local Phase Quantization (LPQ), Weber Local Descriptor (WLD), and Pyramid of Histogram of Oriented Gradients (PHOG), are considered. Supervised Locality Preserving Projection (SLPP) is applied to the respective features for dimensionality reduction and manifold learning. Experiments show that descriptors are also sensitive to the conditions of images, such as race, lighting, pose, etc. Thus, an adaptive descriptor selection algorithm is proposed, which determines the best two features for each expression class on a given training set. These two features are fused, so as to achieve a higher recognition rate for each expression. In our experiments, the JAFFE and BAUM-2 databases are used, and experiment results show that the descriptor selection step increases the recognition rate up to 2%

Une méthode de reconnaissance des expressions du visage basée sur la perception

Session "Atelier VISAGES"National audienceLes humains peuvent reconnaître très facilement les expressions du visage en temps réel. Toutefois, la reconnaissance fiable et rapide des expressions faciales en temps réel est une tâche difficile pour un ordinateur. Nous présentons une nouvelle approche de reconnaissance de trois type d'expressions faciales qui se base sur l'idée de ne considérer que de petites régions du visage bien définies pour en extraire les caractéristiques. Cette proposition est basée sur une étude psycho-visuel expérimental menée avec un eye-tracker. Les mouvements des yeux de quinze sujets ont été enregistrés dans des conditions de visualisation libre d'une collection de 54 vidéos montrant six expressions faciales universelles. Les résultats de cette étude montrent que pour certaines expressions du visage une unique région est perceptuellement plus attractive que les autres. Les autres expressions montrent une attractivité pour deux ou trois régions du visage. Cette connaissance est utilisée pour définir une méthode de reconnaissance se concentrant uniquement sur certaines régions perceptuellement attrayantes du visage et ainsi réduire par un facteur de deux les temps de calcul. Nos résultats montrent une précision de reconnaissance automatique de trois expressions de 99.5% sur la base de données d'expression faciale Cohn-Kanade

Automatic affective dimension recognition from naturalistic facial expressions based on wavelet filtering and PLS regression

Automatic affective dimension recognition from facial expression continuously in naturalistic contexts is a very challenging research topic but very important in human-computer interaction. In this paper, an automatic recognition system was proposed to predict the affective dimensions such as Arousal, Valence and Dominance continuously in naturalistic facial expression videos. Firstly, visual and vocal features are extracted from image frames and audio segments in facial expression videos. Secondly, a wavelet transform based digital filtering method is applied to remove the irrelevant noise information in the feature space. Thirdly, Partial Least Squares regression is used to predict the affective dimensions from both video and audio modalities. Finally, two modalities are combined to boost overall performance in the decision fusion process. The proposed method is tested in the fourth international Audio/Visual Emotion Recognition Challenge (AVEC2014) dataset and compared to other state-of-the-art methods in the affect recognition sub-challenge with a good performance

Facial expression recognition in the wild : from individual to group

The progress in computing technology has increased the demand for smart systems capable of understanding human affect and emotional manifestations. One of the crucial factors in designing systems equipped with such intelligence is to have accurate automatic Facial Expression Recognition (FER) methods. In computer vision, automatic facial expression analysis is an active field of research for over two decades now. However, there are still a lot of questions unanswered. The research presented in this thesis attempts to address some of the key issues of FER in challenging conditions mentioned as follows: 1) creating a facial expressions database representing real-world conditions; 2) devising Head Pose Normalisation (HPN) methods which are independent of facial parts location; 3) creating automatic methods for the analysis of mood of group of people. The central hypothesis of the thesis is that extracting close to real-world data from movies and performing facial expression analysis on movies is a stepping stone in the direction of moving the analysis of faces towards real-world, unconstrained condition. A temporal facial expressions database, Acted Facial Expressions in the Wild (AFEW) is proposed. The database is constructed and labelled using a semi-automatic process based on closed caption subtitle based keyword search. Currently, AFEW is the largest facial expressions database representing challenging conditions available to the research community. For providing a common platform to researchers in order to evaluate and extend their state-of-the-art FER methods, the first Emotion Recognition in the Wild (EmotiW) challenge based on AFEW is proposed. An image-only based facial expressions database Static Facial Expressions In The Wild (SFEW) extracted from AFEW is proposed. Furthermore, the thesis focuses on HPN for real-world images. Earlier methods were based on fiducial points. However, as fiducial points detection is an open problem for real-world images, HPN can be error-prone. A HPN method based on response maps generated from part-detectors is proposed. The proposed shape-constrained method does not require fiducial points and head pose information, which makes it suitable for real-world images. Data from movies and the internet, representing real-world conditions poses another major challenge of the presence of multiple subjects to the research community. This defines another focus of this thesis where a novel approach for modeling the perception of mood of a group of people in an image is presented. A new database is constructed from Flickr based on keywords related to social events. Three models are proposed: averaging based Group Expression Model (GEM), Weighted Group Expression Model (GEM_w) and Augmented Group Expression Model (GEM_LDA). GEM_w is based on social contextual attributes, which are used as weights on each person's contribution towards the overall group's mood. Further, GEM_LDA is based on topic model and feature augmentation. The proposed framework is applied to applications of group candid shot selection and event summarisation. The application of Structural SIMilarity (SSIM) index metric is explored for finding similar facial expressions. The proposed framework is applied to the problem of creating image albums based on facial expressions, finding corresponding expressions for training facial performance transfer algorithms

Exploring human visual system: study to aid the development of automatic facial expression recognition framework

International audienceThis paper focus on understanding human visual system when it decodes or recognizes facial expressions. Results presented can be exploited by the computer vision research community for the development of robust descriptor based on human visual system for facial expressions recognition. We have conducted psycho-visual experimental study to find which facial region is perceptually more attractive or salient for a particular expression. Eye movements of 15 observers were recorded with an eye-tracker in free viewing conditions as they watch a collection of 54 videos selected from Cohn-Kanade facial expression database, showing six universal facial expressions. The results of the study shows that for some facial expressions only one facial region is perceptually more attractive than others. Other cases shows the attractiveness of two to three facial regions. This paper also proposes a novel framework for automatic recognition of expressions which is based on psycho-visual study

Framework for reliable, real-time facial expression recognition for low resolution images

International audienceAutomatic recognition of facial expressions is a challenging problem specially for low spatial resolution facial images. It has many potential applications in human-computer interactions, social robots, deceit detection, interactive video and behavior monitoring. In this study we present a novel framework that can recognize facial expressions very efficiently and with high accuracy even for very low resolution facial images. The proposed framework is memory and time efficient as it extracts texture features in a pyramidal fashion only from the perceptual salient regions of the face. We tested the framework on different databases, which includes Cohn-Kanade (CK+) posed facial expression database, spontaneous expressions of MMI facial expression database and FG-NET facial expressions and emotions database (FEED) and obtained very good results. Moreover, our proposed framework exceeds state-of-the-art methods for expression recognition on low resolution images