• ETRI Journal
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• v.35 no.6
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• pp.1021-1028
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• 2013

Automatic facial expression recognition is a widely studied problem in computer vision and human-robot interaction. There has been a range of studies for representing facial descriptors for facial expression recognition. Some prominent descriptors were presented in the first facial expression recognition and analysis challenge (FERA2011). In that competition, the Local Gabor Binary Pattern Histogram Sequence descriptor showed the most powerful description capability. In this paper, we introduce hybrid facial representations for facial expression recognition, which have more powerful description capability with lower dimensionality. Our descriptors consist of a block-based descriptor and a pixel-based descriptor. The block-based descriptor represents the micro-orientation and micro-geometric structure information. The pixel-based descriptor represents texture information. We validate our descriptors on two public databases, and the results show that our descriptors perform well with a relatively low dimensionality.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.32 no.5
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• pp.784-794
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• 2010

Automatic facial expression recognition has many potential applications in different areas of human computer interaction. However, they are not yet fully realized due to the lack of an effective facial feature descriptor. In this paper, we present a new appearance-based feature descriptor, the local directional pattern (LDP), to represent facial geometry and analyze its performance in expression recognition. An LDP feature is obtained by computing the edge response values in 8 directions at each pixel and encoding them into an 8 bit binary number using the relative strength of these edge responses. The LDP descriptor, a distribution of LDP codes within an image or image patch, is used to describe each expression image. The effectiveness of dimensionality reduction techniques, such as principal component analysis and AdaBoost, is also analyzed in terms of computational cost saving and classification accuracy. Two well-known machine learning methods, template matching and support vector machine, are used for classification using the Cohn-Kanade and Japanese female facial expression databases. Better classification accuracy shows the superiority of LDP descriptor against other appearance-based feature descriptors.

• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.89-94
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• 2016

This paper proposed a facial expression recognition approach using SIFT feature and SVM classifier. The SIFT was generally employed as feature descriptor at key-points in object recognition fields. However, this paper applied the SIFT descriptor as feature vector for facial expression recognition. In this paper, the facial feature was extracted by applying SIFT descriptor at each sub-block image without key-point detection procedure, and the facial expression recognition was performed using SVM classifier. The performance evaluation was carried out through comparison with binary pattern feature-based approaches such as LBP and LDP, and the CK facial expression database and the JAFFE facial expression database were used in the experiments. From the experimental results, the proposed method using SIFT descriptor showed performance improvements of 6.06% and 3.87% compared to previous approaches for CK database and JAFFE database, respectively.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.11 no.9
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• pp.4549-4566
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• 2017

This work presents a novel facial descriptor, which is named as multiscale adaptive local directional texture pattern (MALDTP) and employed for expression recognition. We apply an adaptive threshold value to encode facial image in different scales, and concatenate a series of histograms based on the MALDTP to generate facial descriptor in term of Gabor filters. In addition, some dedicated experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance of the MALDTP method in a person-independent way. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves higher recognition rate than local directional texture pattern (LDTP). Moreover, the MALDTP method has lower computational complexity, fewer storage space and higher classification accuracy than local Gabor binary pattern histogram sequence (LGBPHS) method. In a nutshell, the proposed MALDTP method can not only avoid choosing the threshold by experience but also contain much more structural and contrast information of facial image than LDTP.

• Journal of the Korea Computer Graphics Society
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.29-37
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• 2010

In this paper, we present a novel deformation method for alleviating the asymmetry of a scanned 3D face considering facial features. To handle detailed areas of the face, we developed a new local 3D shape descriptor based on facial features and surface curvatures. Our shape descriptor can improve the accuracy when deforming a 3D face toward a symmetric configuration, because it provides accurate point pairing with respect to the plane of symmetry. In addition, we use point-based representation over all stages of symmetrization, which makes it much easier to support discrete processes. Finally, we performed a statistical analysis to assess subjects' preference for the symmetrized faces by our approach.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.12 no.12
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• pp.6000-6017
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• 2018

This paper presents a new descriptor, named Histograms of Prominent Edge Directions (HPED), for the recognition of facial expressions in a person-independent environment. In this paper, we raise the issue of sampling error in generating the code-histogram from spatial regions of the face image, as observed in the existing descriptors. HPED describes facial appearance changes based on the statistical distribution of the top two prominent edge directions (i.e., primary and secondary direction) captured over small spatial regions of the face. Compared to existing descriptors, HPED uses a smaller number of code-bins to describe the spatial regions, which helps avoid sampling error despite having fewer samples while preserving the valuable spatial information. In contrast to the existing Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) that uses the histogram of the primary edge direction (i.e., gradient orientation) only, we additionally consider the histogram of the secondary edge direction, which provides more meaningful shape information related to the local texture. Experiments on popular facial expression datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed HPED against existing descriptors in a person-independent environment.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.3 no.6
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• pp.13-24
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• 2002

This paper presents an automatic approach to detect face and facial feature from face images based on the color information and deformable model. Skin color information has been widely used for face and facial feature diction since it is effective for object recognition and has less computational burden, In this paper, we propose how to compensates varying light condition and utilize the transformed YCbCr color model to detect candidates region of face and facial feature from color images, Moreover, the detected face facial feature areas are subsequently assigned to a initial condition of active contour model to extract optimal boundaries of face and facial feature by resolving initial boundary problem when the active contour is used, The experimental results show the efficiency of the proposed method, The face and facial feature information will be used for face recognition and facial feature descriptor.

• Journal of KIISE
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• v.44 no.7
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• pp.692-702
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• 2017

Face detection using the LBP based feature descriptor has issues in that it can not represent spatial information between facial shape and facial components such as eyes, nose and mouth. To address these issues, in previous research, a facial image was divided into a number of square sub-regions. However, since the sub-regions are divided into different numbers and sizes, the division criteria of the sub-region suitable for the database used in the experiment is ambiguous, the dimension of the LBP histogram increases in proportion to the number of sub-regions and as the number of sub-regions increases, the sensitivity to facial orientation rotation increases significantly. In this paper, we present a novel facial region segmentation method that can solve in-plane rotation issues associated with LBP based feature descriptors and the number of dimensions of feature descriptors. As a result, the proposed method showed detection accuracy of 99.0278% from a single facial image rotated in orientation.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.2124-2148
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• 2017

Accurate facial expression recognition (FER) requires reliable signal filtering and the effective feature extraction. Considering these requirements, this paper presents a novel approach for FER which is robust to noise. The main contributions of this work are: First, to preserve texture details in facial expression images and remove image noise, we improved the anisotropic diffusion filter by adjusting the diffusion coefficient according to two factors, namely, the gray value difference between the object and the background and the gradient magnitude of object. The improved filter can effectively distinguish facial muscle deformation and facial noise in face images. Second, to further improve robustness, we propose a new feature descriptor based on a combination of the Histogram of Oriented Gradients with the Canny operator (Canny-HOG) which can represent the precise deformation of eyes, eyebrows and lips for FER. Third, Canny-HOG's block and cell sizes are adjusted to reduce feature dimensionality and make the classifier less prone to overfitting. Our method was tested on images from the JAFFE and CK databases. Experimental results in L-O-Sam-O and L-O-Sub-O modes demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method. Meanwhile, the recognition rate of this method is not significantly affected in the presence of Gaussian noise and salt-and-pepper noise conditions.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.10 no.11
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• pp.5605-5623
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• 2016

We propose a face recognition method that utilizes the LCP face descriptor. The proposed method applies a LoG mask to extract a face contour response, and employs the LCP algorithm to produce a binary pattern representation that ensures high recognition performance even under the changes in illumination, noise, and aging. The proposed LCP algorithm produces excellent noise reduction and efficiency in removing unnecessary information from the face by extracting a face contour response using the LoG mask, whose behavior is similar to the human eye. Majority of reported algorithms search for face contour response information. On the other hand, our proposed LCP algorithm produces results expressing major facial information by applying the threshold to the search area with only 8 bits. However, the LCP algorithm produces results that express major facial information with only 8-bits by applying a threshold value to the search area. Therefore, compared to previous approaches, the LCP algorithm maintains a consistent accuracy under varying circumstances, and produces a high face recognition rate with a relatively small feature vector. The test results indicate that the LCP algorithm produces a higher facial recognition rate than the rate of human visual's recognition capability, and outperforms the existing methods.