Enhanced Facial Emotion Recognition by Optimal Descriptor Selection with Neural Network

Abstract

Facial Emotion Recognition (FER) is the approach of detecting emotions of humans from facial expressions. Emotions are detected automatically by the human brain and hence, many computer aided techniques are implemented for recognizing emotions. Recognition of natural emotions is an exciting area with a broad range of real time applications like automated tutoring models, smart environments computer–human interaction, driver warning systems, and video and image retrieval. The major goal of this paper is to implement an intelligent model for FER. The proposed model involves few steps: (a) Face extraction (b) Image filtering, (c) Extraction of facial components, (d) Descriptor selection, and (d) Classification. Initially, the face is extracted from the input image by the Viola–Jones method, which is generally employed for the detection of object. Further, the noise of the image is filtered by the Gabor Filtering. Further, the facial components are extracted as features via the Affine-Scale-Invariant Feature Transform (ASIFT), which is the modified version of SIFT method. Since the length of the descriptors generated from ASIFT is high; the number of descriptors is reduced by the optimal descriptor selection approach with the aid of hybrid meta-heuristic algorithm termed as MV-WOA. The extracted descriptors are subjected to Neural Network (NN). As a modification to the existing machine learning algorithms, the number of hidden neurons in the NN is optimized by the proposed WOA+MVO algorithm. By conducting experiments, the results demonstrate that the developed system can perform better the recent traditional approaches for emotion recognition for classifying seven emotions like normal, smile, sad, surprise, anger, fear, and disgust.