A Local Feature-Based Robust Approach for Facial Expression Recognition from Depth Video

Facial expression recognition (FER) plays a very significant role in computer vision, pattern recognition, and image processing applications such as human computer interaction as it provides sufficient information about emotions of people. For video-based facial expression recognition, depth cameras can be better candidates over RGB cameras as a person's face cannot be easily recognized from distance-based depth videos hence depth cameras also resolve some privacy issues that can arise using RGB faces. A good FER system is very much reliant on the extraction of robust features as well as recognition engine. In this work, an efficient novel approach is proposed to recognize some facial expressions from time-sequential depth videos. First of all, efficient Local Binary Pattern (LBP) features are obtained from the time-sequential depth faces that are further classified by Generalized Discriminant Analysis (GDA) to make the features more robust and finally, the LBP-GDA features are fed into Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) to train and recognize different facial expressions successfully. The depth information-based proposed facial expression recognition approach is compared to the conventional approaches such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Independent Component Analysis (ICA), and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) where the proposed one outperforms others by obtaining better recognition rates.