Facial expression based automatic album creation

Abstract

With simple cost effective imaging solutions being widely available these days, there has been an enormous rise in the number of images consumers have been taking. Due to this increase, searching, browsing and managing images in multi-media systems has become more complex. One solution to this problem is to divide images into albums for meaningful and effective browsing. We propose a novel automated, expression driven image album creation for consumer image management systems. The system groups images with faces having similar expressions into albums. Facial expressions of the subjects are grouped into albums by the Structural Similarity Index measure, which is based on the theory on how easily the human visual system can extract the shape information of a scene. We also propose a search by similar expression, in which the user can create albums by providing example facial expression images. A qualitative analysis of the performance of the system is presented on the basis of a user study. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.