Facial Expression Recognition Using Local Region Specific Dense Optical Flow and LBP Features

Abstract

Recognition of facial expression has many applications including human-computer interaction, human emotion analysis, personality development, cognitive science, health-care, virtual reality, image retrieval, etc. In this paper we propose a new method for recognition of facial expression using local region specific mean optical flow and local binary pattern feature descriptor with support vector machine classification. In general, facial expression recognition techniques divide the face into regular grid (holistic representation) and the facial features are extracted. However, in this paper we divide the face into domain specific local regions. At first a robust optical flow is utilized to get mean optical flow in different directions for each local region which considers both local statistic motion information and its spatial location. The features are used only from the key frames; which are detected based on maximal mean optical flow magnitude within a sequence w.r.t. neutral frame. Now, the region specific local binary pattern is extracted from key frame and concatenated with mean optical flow features. The performance of the proposed facial expression recognition system has been validated on CK+ facial expression dataset.