Signal processing and machine learning techniques for automatic image-based facial expression recognition

PhD ThesisIn this thesis novel signal processing and machine learning techniques are proposed and evaluated for automatic image-based facial expression recognition, which are aimed to progress towards real world operation. A thorough evaluation of the performance of certain image-based expression recognition techniques is performed using a posed database and for the rst time three progressively more challenging spontaneous databases. These methods exploit the principles of sparse representation theory with identity-independent expression recognition using di erence images. The second contribution exploits a low complexity method to extract geometric features from facial expression images. The misalignment problem of the training images is solved and the performance of both geometric and appearance features is assessed on the same three spontaneous databases. A deep network framework that contains auto-encoders is used to form an improved classi er. The nal work focuses upon enhancing the expression recognition performance by the selection and fusion of di erent types of features comprising geometric features and two sorts of appearance features. This provides a rich feature vector by which the best representation of the spontaneous facial features is obtained. Subsequently, the computational complexity is reduced by maintaining important location information by concentrating on the crucial roles of the facial regions as the basic processing instead of the entire face, where the local binary patterns and local phase quantization features are extracted automatically by means of detecting two important regions of the face. Next, an automatic method for splitting the training e ort of the initial network into several networks and multi-classi ers namely a surface network and bottom network are used to solve the problem and to enhance the performance. All methods are evaluated in a MATLAB framework and confusion matrices and average facial expression recognition accuracy are used as the performance metrics.Ministry of Higher Education and Scienti c Research in Iraq (MOHESR

Recognition of Facial Expressions using Local Mean Binary Pattern

In this paper, we propose a novel appearance based local feature extraction technique called Local Mean Binary Pattern (LMBP), which efficiently encodes the local texture and global shape of the face. LMBP code is produced by weighting the thresholded neighbor intensity values with respect to mean of 3 x 3 patch. LMBP produces highly discriminative code compared to other state of the art methods. The micro pattern is derived using the mean of the patch, and hence it is robust against illumination and noise variations. An image is divided into M x N regions and feature descriptor is derived by concatenating LMBP distribution of each region. We also propose a novel template matching strategy called Histogram Normalized Absolute Difference (HNAD) for comparing LMBP histograms. Rigorous experiments prove the effectiveness and robustness of LMBP operator. Experiments also prove the superiority of HNAD measure over well-known template matching methods such as L2 norm and Chi-Square measure. We also investigated LMBP for facial expression recognition low resolution. The performance of the proposed approach is tested on well-known datasets CK, JAFFE, and TFEID

Spatio-temporal framework on facial expression recognition.

This thesis presents an investigation into two topics that are important in facial expression recognition: how to employ the dynamic information from facial expression image sequences and how to efficiently extract context and other relevant information of different facial regions. This involves the development of spatio-temporal frameworks for recognising facial expression. The thesis proposed three novel frameworks for recognising facial expression. The first framework uses sparse representation to extract features from patches of a face to improve the recognition performance, where part-based methods which are robust to image alignment are applied. In addition, the use of sparse representation reduces the dimensionality of features, and improves the semantic meaning and represents a face image more efficiently. Since a facial expression involves a dynamic process, and the process contains information that describes a facial expression more effectively, it is important to capture such dynamic information so as to recognise facial expressions over the entire video sequence. Thus, the second framework uses two types of dynamic information to enhance the recognition: a novel spatio-temporal descriptor based on PHOG (pyramid histogram of gradient) to represent changes in facial shape, and dense optical flow to estimate the movement (displacement) of facial landmarks. The framework views an image sequence as a spatio-temporal volume, and uses temporal information to represent the dynamic movement of facial landmarks associated with a facial expression. Specifically, spatial based descriptor representing spatial local shape is extended to spatio-temporal domain to capture the changes in local shape of facial sub-regions in the temporal dimension to give 3D facial component sub-regions of forehead, mouth, eyebrow and nose. The descriptor of optical flow is also employed to extract the information of temporal. The fusion of these two descriptors enhance the dynamic information and achieves better performance than the individual descriptors. The third framework also focuses on analysing the dynamics of facial expression sequences to represent spatial-temporal dynamic information (i.e., velocity). Two types of features are generated: a spatio-temporal shape representation to enhance the local spatial and dynamic information, and a dynamic appearance representation. In addition, an entropy-based method is introduced to provide spatial relationship of different parts of a face by computing the entropy value of different sub-regions of a face