A Novel Transferable Sparse Regression Method for Cross-Database Facial Expression Recognition

Abstract

In this letter, we propose a novel transferable sparse regression (TSR) method, for cross-database facial expression recognition (FER). In TSR, we firstly present a novel regression function to regress the data into a latent representation space instead of a strict binary label space. To further alleviate the influence of outliers and overfitting, we impose a row sparsity constraint on the regression term. And a pairwise relation term is introduced to guide the feature transfer learning. Secondly, we design a global graph to transfer knowledge, which can well preserve the cross-database manifold structure. Moreover, we introduce a low-rank constraint on the graph regularization term to uncover additional structural information. Finally, several experiments are conducted on three popular facial expression databases, and the results validate that the proposed TSR method is superior to other non-deep and deep transfer learning methods.