Sketch based facial expression recognition using graphics hardware

Abstract

In this paper, a novel system is proposed to recognize facial expression based on face sketch, which is produced by programmable graphics hardware-GPU(Graphics Processing Unit). Firstly, an expression subspace is set up from a corpus of images consisting of seven basic expressions. Secondly, by applying a GPU based edge detection algorithm, the real-time facial expression sketch extraction is performed. Subsequently, noise elimination is carried out by tone mapping operation on GPU. Then, an ASM instance is trained to track the facial feature points in the sketched face image more efficiently and precisely than that on a grey level image directly. Finally, by the normalized key feature points, Eigen expression vector is deduced to be the input of MSVM(Multi-SVMs) based expression recognition model, which is introduced to perform the expression classification. Test expression images are categorized by MSVM into one of the seven basic expression subspaces. Experiment on a data set containing 500 pictures clearly shows the efficacy of the algorithm. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.