Integration of 2D Textural and 3D Geometric Features for Robust Facial Expression Recognition

Recognition of facial expressions is critical for successful social interactions and relationships. Facial expressions transmit emotional information, which is critical for human-machine interaction; therefore, significant research in computer vision has been conducted, with promising findings in using facial expression detection in both academia and industry. 3D pictures acquired enormous popularity owing to their ability to overcome some of the constraints inherent in 2D imagery, such as lighting and variation. We present a method for recognizing facial expressions in this article by combining features extracted from 2D textured pictures and 3D geometric data using the Local Binary Pattern (LBP) and the 3D Voxel Histogram of Oriented Gradients (3DVHOG), respectively. We performed various pre-processing operations using the MDPA-FACE3D and Bosphorus datasets, then we carried out classification process to classify images into seven universal emotions, namely anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, neutral, and surprise. Using Support Vector Machine classifier, we achieved the accuracy of 88.5 % and 92.9 % on the MDPA-FACE3D and the Bosphorus datasets, respectively

Matching 3D face scans using interest points and local histogram descriptors

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BRUISE DETECTION IN APPLES USING 3D INFRARED IMAGING AND MACHINE LEARNING TECHNOLOGIES

Bruise detection plays an important role in fruit grading. A bruise detection system capable of finding and removing damaged products on the production lines will distinctly improve the quality of fruits for sale, and consequently improve the fruit economy. This dissertation presents a novel automatic detection system based on surface information obtained from 3D near-infrared imaging technique for bruised apple identification. The proposed 3D bruise detection system is expected to provide better performance in bruise detection than the existing 2D systems. We first propose a mesh denoising filter to reduce noise effect while preserving the geometric features of the meshes. Compared with several existing mesh denoising filters, the proposed filter achieves better performance in reducing noise effect as well as preserving bruised regions in 3D meshes of bruised apples. Next, we investigate two different machine learning techniques for the identification of bruised apples. The first technique is to extract hand-crafted feature from 3D meshes, and train a predictive classifier based on hand-crafted features. It is shown that the predictive model trained on the proposed hand-crafted features outperforms the same models trained on several other local shape descriptors. The second technique is to apply deep learning to learn the feature representation automatically from the mesh data, and then use the deep learning model or a new predictive model for the classification. The optimized deep learning model achieves very high classification accuracy, and it outperforms the performance of the detection system based on the proposed hand-crafted features. At last, we investigate GPU techniques for accelerating the proposed apple bruise detection system. Specifically, the dissertation proposes a GPU framework, implemented in CUDA, for the acceleration of the algorithm that extracts vertex-based local binary patterns. Experimental results show that the proposed GPU program speeds up the process of extracting local binary patterns by 5 times compared to a single-core CPU program

Towards spatial and temporal analysis of facial expressions in 3D data

Facial expressions are one of the most important means for communication of emotions and meaning. They are used to clarify and give emphasis, to express intentions, and form a crucial part of any human interaction. The ability to automatically recognise and analyse expressions could therefore prove to be vital in human behaviour understanding, which has applications in a number of areas such as psychology, medicine and security. 3D and 4D (3D+time) facial expression analysis is an expanding field, providing the ability to deal with problems inherent to 2D images, such as out-of-plane motion, head pose, and lighting and illumination issues. Analysis of data of this kind requires extending successful approaches applied to the 2D problem, as well as the development of new techniques. The introduction of recent new databases containing appropriate expression data, recorded in 3D or 4D, has allowed research into this exciting area for the first time. This thesis develops a number of techniques, both in 2D and 3D, that build towards a complete system for analysis of 4D expressions. Suitable feature types, designed by employing binary pattern methods, are developed for analysis of 3D facial geometry data. The full dynamics of 4D expressions are modelled, through a system reliant on motion-based features, to demonstrate how the different components of the expression (neutral-onset-apex-offset) can be distinguished and harnessed. Further, the spatial structure of expressions is harnessed to improve expression component intensity estimation in 2D videos. Finally, it is discussed how this latter step could be extended to 3D facial expression analysis, and also combined with temporal analysis. Thus, it is demonstrated that both spatial and temporal information, when combined with appropriate 3D features, is critical in analysis of 4D expression data.Open Acces

Discriminant feature extraction and selection for person-independent facial expression recognition

This thesis is to develop new facial expression recognition techniques based on 2D/3D images or videos, with the purpose to improve the recognition efficiency and accuracy of the current state-of-art. A fully automatic facial expression recognition system is designed, including real-time landmark detection, spatio-temporal feature extraction, hierarchical classification, and most discriminant facial regions identification for expression recognition. In general, the proposed system improved the facial expression recognition state-of-art

Deep learning based facial expression recognition and its applications

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonFacial expression recognition (FER) is a research area that consists of classifying the human emotions through the expressions on their face. It can be used in applications such as biometric security, intelligent human-computer interaction, robotics, and clinical medicine for autism, depression, pain and mental health problems. This dissertation investigates the advanced technologies for facial expression analysis and develops the artificial intelligent systems for practical applications. The first part of this work applies geometric and texture domain feature extractors along with various machine learning techniques to improve FER. Advanced 2D and 3D facial processing techniques such as Edge Oriented Histograms (EOH) and Facial Mesh Distances (FMD) are then fused together using a framework designed to investigate their individual and combined domain performances. Following these tests, the face is then broken down into facial parts using advanced facial alignment and localising techniques. Deep learning in the form of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) is also explored also FER. A novel approach is used for the deep network architecture design, to learn the facial parts jointly, showing an improvement over using the whole face. Joint Bayesian is also adapted in the form of metric learning, to work with deep feature representations of the facial parts. This provides a further improvement over using the deep network alone. Dynamic emotion content is explored as a solution to provide richer information than still images. The motion occurring across the content is initially captured using the Motion History Histogram descriptor (MHH) and is critically evaluated. Based on this observation, several improvements are proposed through extensions such as Average Spatial Pooling Multi-scale Motion History Histogram (ASMMHH). This extension adds two modifications, first is to view the content in different spatial dimensions through spatial pooling; influenced by the structure of CNNs. The other modification is to capture motion at different speeds. Combined, they have provided better performance over MHH, and other popular techniques like Local Binary Patterns – Three Orthogonal Planes (LBP-TOP). Finally, the dynamic emotion content is observed in the feature space, with sequences of images represented as sequences of extracted features. A novel technique called Facial Dynamic History Histogram (FDHH) is developed to capture patterns of variations within the sequence of features; an approach not seen before. FDHH is applied in an end to end framework for applications in Depression analysis and evaluating the induced emotions through a large set of video clips from various movies. With the combination of deep learning techniques and FDHH, state-of-the-art results are achieved for Depression analysis