Facial expression decoding based on fMRI brain signal

Abstract

The analysis of facial expressions is a hot topic in brain-computer interface research. To determine the facial expressions of the subjects under the corresponding stimulation, we analyze the fMRI images acquired by the Magnetic Resonance. There are six kinds of facial expressions: "anger", "disgust", "sadness", "happiness", "joy" and "surprise". We demonstrate that brain decoding is achievable through the parsing of two facial expressions ("anger" and "joy"). Support vector machine and extreme learning machine are selected to classify these expressions based on time series features. Experimental results show that the classification performance of the extreme learning machine algorithm is better than support vector machine. Among the eight participants in the trials, the classification accuracy of three subjects reached 70-80%, and the remaining five subjects also achieved accuracy of 50-60%. Therefore, we can conclude that the brain decoding can be used to help analyzing human facial expressions.