<title>Facial expression recognition on a people-dependent personal facial expression space (PFES)</title>

Abstract

In this paper, a person-specific facial expression recognition method which is based on Personal Facial Expression Space (PFES) is presented. The multidimensional scaling maps facial images as points in lower dimensions in PFES. It reflects personality of facial expressions as it is based on the peak instant of facial expression images of a specific person. In constructing PFES for a person, his/her whole normalized facial image is considered as a single pattern without block segmentation and differences of 2-D DCT coefficients from neutral facial image of the same person are used as features. Therefore, in the early part of the paper, separation characteristics of facial expressions in the frequency domain are analyzed using a still facial image database which consists of neutral, smile, anger, surprise and sadness facial images for each of 60 Japanese males (300 facial images). Results show that facial expression categories are well separated in the low frequency domain. PFES is constructed using multidimensional scaling by taking these low frequency domain of differences of 2-D DCT coefficients as features. On the PFES, trajectory of a facial image sequence of a person can be calculated in real time. Based on this trajectory, facial expressions can be recognized. Experimental results show the effectiveness of this method.© (2000) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.