Facial expression recognition – A real time approach

• Published in: Expert systems with applications Vol. 36; no. 1; pp. 303 - 308
• Main Authors: Geetha, A., Ramalingam, V., Palanivel, S., Palaniappan, B.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Ltd 2009
• Subjects: Face localization; Facial expression recognition; Feature extraction; Support vector machine; Face localization; Facial expression recognition; Feature extraction; Support vector machine
• ISSN: 0957-4174; 1873-6793
• DOI: 10.1016/j.eswa.2007.09.002

Face localization, feature extraction, and modeling are the major issues in automatic facial expression recognition. In this paper, a method for facial expression recognition is proposed. A face is located by extracting the head contour points using the motion information. A rectangular bounding box is fitted for the face region using those extracted contour points. Among the facial features, eyes are the most prominent features used for determining the size of a face. Hence eyes are located and the visual features of a face are extracted based on the locations of eyes. The visual features are modeled using support vector machine (SVM) for facial expression recognition. The SVM finds an optimal hyperplane to distinguish different facial expressions with an accuracy of 98.5%.