Emotion recognition from facial images using binary face relevance maps

Abstract

This paper is focused on automatic emotion recognition from static grayscale images. Here, we propose a new approach to this problem, which combines a few other methods. The facial region is divided into small subregions, which are selected for processing based on a face relevance map. From these regions, local directional pattern histograms are extracted and concatenated into a single feature histogram, which is classified into one of seven defined emotional states using support vector machines. In our case, we distinguish: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, neutrality, sadness and surprise. In our experimental study we demonstrate that the expression recognition accuracy for Japanese Female Facial Expression database is one of the best compared with the results reported in the literature.