Gaussian process dynamical models for emotion recognition

Abstract

We describe a method for dynamic emotion recognition from facial expression sequences. Our model is based on learning a latent space using the Gaussian Process Latent Variable Model (GP-LVM), encapsulating facial landmarks shapes which describe a given facial expression. We incorporate the dynamic model by learning the latent representation, with the aim to respect the data’s dynamics (facial shapes should maintain their correspondence along time). Then, a Gaussian process classifier is implemented to evaluate the relevance of the latent space features in the emotion recognition task. The results show that the proposed method can efficiently model a dynamic facial emotion and recognize with high accuracy a facial emotion sequence.