Impact of the face registration techniques on facial expressions recognition

• Published in: Signal processing. Image communication Vol. 61; pp. 44 - 53
• Main Authors: Allaert, B., Mennesson, J., Bilasco, I.M., Djeraba, C.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Amsterdam Elsevier B.V 01.02.2018; Elsevier BV; Elsevier
• Subjects: Accuracy; Cameras; Computer Science; Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition; Experiments; Face; Face recognition; Facial expressions; Head movement; Head pose variations; Impact analysis; Large displacements; Recognition; Facial expressions; Large displacements; Head pose variations
• ISSN: 0923-5965; 1879-2677
• DOI: 10.1016/j.image.2017.11.002

Recent methodologies for facial expression recognition have been proposed and have obtained good results in near-frontal view. However, these situations do not fairly represent in-the-wild challenges, where expressions are natural and the subject is free of its movement. This is reflected in the accuracy drop of facial expression methods obtained on recent databases. Two challenges (head pose variations and large displacements) in facial expression recognition are studied in this paper. Experiments are proposed in order to quantify the impact of free head movements using representative expression recognition approaches (LBP, LBP-TOP, HOOF). We propose an experimental protocol (SNaP-2DFe) that records, under controlled light, facial expressions with two cameras: one attached on the head and one placed in front of the subject. As in both cameras facial expressions are the same, differences in performances measured on each camera show the impact of head pose variations and large displacements on the underlying recognition approach. •Quantify the impact of free head movements on expression recognition performances.•Study the ability of face registration techniques to preserve the facial expression.•Synchronized frontal and non-frontal data for enhancing new registration techniques.