A robust incremental clustering-based facial feature tracking

Abstract

Emerging significance of person-independent, emotion specific facial feature tracking has been actively tracked in the machine vision society for decades. Among distinct methods, the Constrained Local Model (CLM) has shown significant results in person-independent feature tracking. In this paper, we propose an automatic, efficient, and robust method for emotion specific facial feature detection and tracking from image sequences. A novel tracking system along with 17-point feature model on the frontal face region has also been proposed to facilitate the tracking of human basic facial expressions. The proposed feature tracking system keeps patch images and face shapes till certain number of key frames incorporating CLM-based tracker. After that, incremental patch and shape clustering algorithms is applied to build appearance model and structure model of similar patches and similar shapes respectively. The clusters in each model are built and updated incrementally and online, controlled by amount of facial muscle movement. The overall performance of the proposed Robust Incremental Clustering-based Facial Feature Tracking (RICFFT) is evaluated on the FGnet database and the Extended Cohn-Kanade (CK+) database. RICFFT demonstrates mean tracking accuracy of 97.45% and 96.64% for FGnet and CK+ database respectively. Also, RICFFT is more robust by minimizing average shape distortion error of 0.20% and 1.86% for FGnet and CK+ (apex frame) database, as compared with classic method CLM.