Facial expression recognition and its degree estimation

The purpose of this study is not only to recognize some kind of facial expressions which is associated with human emotion but also to estimate its degree. Our method is based on the idea that facial expression recognition can be achieved by extracting a variation from expressionless face with considering face area as a whole pattern. For the purpose of extracting subtle changes in the face such as the degree of expressions, it is necessary to eliminate the individuality appearing in the facial image. Using a elastic net model, a variation of facial expression is represented as motion vectors of the deformed Net from a facial edge image. Then, applying K-L expansion, the change of facial expression represented as the motion vectors of nodes is mapped into low dimensional eigen space, and estimation is achieved by projecting input images on to the Emotion Space. In this paper we have constructed three kinds of expression models: happiness, anger, surprise, curd experimental results are evaluated.